There is a fearful splendor in absolute desolation.
JAMES BALDWINIf you’re treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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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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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.
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You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.
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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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Our crown has already been bought and paid for. All we have to do is wear it.
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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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Those who say it can’t be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.
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The world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.
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Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
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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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True rebels after all, are as rare as true lovers,and in both cases, to mistake a fever for passion can destroy one’s life.
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It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.
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I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.
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The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
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No one is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart: for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
JAMES BALDWIN