The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world’s definitions.
JAMES BALDWINPerhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark.
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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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There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.
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The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.
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The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way a person looks at reality, then you can change it.
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Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.
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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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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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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.
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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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Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
JAMES BALDWIN -
No man is a devil in his own mind.
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You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.
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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.
JAMES BALDWIN