“I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.”
James Baldwin
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Life
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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.”
James Baldwin
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Sex
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“American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.”
James Baldwin
Submitted by Quonation |Category: History
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“Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.”
James Baldwin
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Death
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“At bottom, to be colored means that one has been caught in some utterly unbelievable cosmic joke, a joke so hideous and in such bad taste that it defeats all categories and definitions.”
James Baldwin
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Race
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“It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian.”
James Baldwin
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Race
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“The American ideal, after all, is that everyone should be as much alike as possible.”
James Baldwin
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Conformity
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“The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.”
James Baldwin
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Writing
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“A platitude is simply a truth repeated till people get tired of hearing it.”
James Baldwin
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Truth
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“The moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.”
James Baldwin
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Work
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“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
James Baldwin
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Change
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“People can cry much easier than they can change.”
James Baldwin
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Change
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“When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.”
James Baldwin
Submitted by Quonation |Category: General
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“Anyone who has struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.”
James Baldwin
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Poverty
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“It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.”
James Baldwin
Submitted by Quonation |Category: General
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“The future is… black.”
James Baldwin
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Future
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“Experience is a private, and a very largely speechless affair.”
James Baldwin
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Experience
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“Experience that destroys innocents also leads one back to it.”
James Baldwin
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Experience
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“A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.”
James Baldwin
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Education
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“Be careful what you set your heart upon — for it will surely be yours.”
James Baldwin
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Desire
