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 BALDWINTrue rebels after all, are as rare as true lovers,and in both cases, to mistake a fever for passion can destroy one’s life.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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The world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.
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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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You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
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The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
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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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Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.
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When you’re writing you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know.
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Education is indoctrination if you’re white – subjugation if you’re black.
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Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
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The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.
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The moment we cease to hold each other, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.
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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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I want to be an honest man and a good writer.
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There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.
JAMES BALDWIN