People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
JAMES BALDWINPerhaps he is a fool or a coward but almost everybody is one or the other and most people are both.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.
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The world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.
JAMES BALDWIN -
To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.
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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.
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Literature is indispensable to the world.
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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.
JAMES BALDWIN -
The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.
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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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Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.
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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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People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception.
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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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I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.
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People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.
JAMES BALDWIN






