I often wonder what I’d do if there weren’t any books in the world.
JAMES BALDWINLove was a country he knew nothing about.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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You write in order to change the world, if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.
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Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.
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People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.
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Love brought you here. If you trusted love this far, don’t panic now.
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It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
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Everyone wishes to be loved, but in the event, nearly no one can bear it. Everyone desires love but also finds it impossible to believe that he deserves it.
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The paradox of education is precisely this – that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.
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Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
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It’s a miracle to realize that somebody loves you.
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The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.
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The impossible is the least that one can demand.
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I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also so much more than that. So are we all.
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The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.
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Our crown has already been bought and paid for. All we have to do is wear it.
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Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity.
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There is a fearful splendor in absolute desolation.
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There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.
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Youth must be the worst time in anybody’s life.
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Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?
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The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
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Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.
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Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.
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History is not a procession of illustrious people. It’s about what happens to a people. Millions of anonymous people is what history is about.
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Literature is indispensable to the world.
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The world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.
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You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
JAMES BALDWIN