The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
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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Our crown has already been bought and paid for. All we have to do is wear it.
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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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American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.
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The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.
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When you’re writing you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know.
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People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception.
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Nakedness has no color: this can come as news only to those who have never covered, or been covered by, another naked human being.
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I want to be an honest man and a good writer.
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If a society permits one portion of its citizenry to be menaced or destroyed, then, very soon, no one in that society is safe.
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The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
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The impossible is the least that one can demand.
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There are people in the world for whom “coming along” is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.
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Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
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The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains.
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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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It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.
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Those who say it can’t be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.
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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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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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Youth must be the worst time in anybody’s life.
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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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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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Love brought you here. If you trusted love this far, don’t panic now.
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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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People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.
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If you cannot love me, I will die. Before you came I wanted to die, I have told you many times. It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody
JAMES BALDWIN