You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live some other life, you won’t live any life at all.
JAMES BALDWINChildren have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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People can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents.
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The impossible is the least that one can demand.
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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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No one is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart: for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
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There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.
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The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way a person looks at reality, then you can change it.
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If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.
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You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
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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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Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
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Love was a country he knew nothing about.
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Perhaps he is a fool or a coward but almost everybody is one or the other and most people are both.
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Artists are here to disturb the peace.
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People don’t have any mercy. They tear you limb from limb, in the name of love.
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It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
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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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People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
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All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique.
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People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.
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Literature is indispensable to the world.
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I want to be an honest man and a good writer.
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It is easy to proclaim all souls equal in the sight of God; it is hard to make men equal on earth in the sight of men.
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Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.
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When you’re writing you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know.
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Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.
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The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.
JAMES BALDWIN