I often wonder what I’d do if there weren’t any books in the world.
JAMES BALDWINLiterature is indispensable to the world.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.
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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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The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world’s definitions.
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Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.
JAMES BALDWIN -
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.
JAMES BALDWIN -
You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.
JAMES BALDWIN -
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 world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
JAMES BALDWIN -
The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Love was a country he knew nothing about.
JAMES BALDWIN -
No one is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart: for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
JAMES BALDWIN -
People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
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People can cry much easier than they can change.
JAMES BALDWIN -
For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for what they become.
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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.
JAMES BALDWIN