American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.
JAMES BALDWINIf I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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Literature is indispensable to the world.
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Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.
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The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat.
JAMES BALDWIN -
For nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.
JAMES BALDWIN -
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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Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.
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People can cry much easier than they can change.
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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.
JAMES BALDWIN -
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
JAMES BALDWIN -
People don’t have any mercy. They tear you limb from limb, in the name of love.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.
JAMES BALDWIN -
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.
JAMES BALDWIN -
To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Those who say it can’t be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.
JAMES BALDWIN -
I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.
JAMES BALDWIN