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.
JAMES BALDWINPerhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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People can cry much easier than they can change.
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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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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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I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.
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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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Literature is indispensable to the world.
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If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.
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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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Our crown has already been bought and paid for. All we have to do is wear 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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The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
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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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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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It’s a miracle to realize that somebody loves you.
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No one is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart: for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
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All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it.
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I often wonder what I’d do if there weren’t any books in the world.
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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.
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Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.
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Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.
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Love was a country he knew nothing about.
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If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.
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Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?
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Colour is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.
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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.
JAMES BALDWIN