James A. Baldwin Quotes
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Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.
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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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Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?
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Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
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It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
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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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No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.
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The question of sexual dominance can exist only in the nightmare of that soul which has armed itself, totally, against the possibility of the changing motion of conquest and surrender, which is love.
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The future is like heaven, everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now.
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Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
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There is a 'sanctity' involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.
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Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did.
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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.
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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 young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did - which was to hide.
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There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man. What is left of that man flees from what is left of human attention.
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Everybody's journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.
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To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.
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People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
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I want to be an honest man and a good writer.
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People can cry much easier than they can change.
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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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The writer's greed is appalling. He wants, or seems to want, everything and practically everybody, in another sense, and at the same time, he needs no one at all.
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Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.