I must—to be honest—add that my ministry almost certainly helped me through my adolescence by giving me something larger than myself to be frightened about.


James Baldwin

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I'm often uncomfortable with girliness, to be honest.
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So it must be something other than my book, if you go by his analysis it's something other than me.
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It's better to be honest about your opinions than to pretend you don't have them.
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I think it's an awful drink, to be honest with you.
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I've got no timetable. I'm sort of sick of timetables, to be honest.
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when your heart touched mine,I knew then we were one.
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More than any woman I ever knew, she comforted.' -Mrs. Huxley about Emma
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I know that people can be better than they are. We are capable of bearing a great burden, once we di...
JAMES BALDWIN
Some moments in a life, and they needn't be very long or seem very important, can make up for so muc...
JAMES BALDWIN
The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the fo...
JAMES BALDWIN
It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connect...
JAMES BALDWIN
If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more...
JAMES BALDWIN
There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for the...
JAMES BALDWIN
It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death-- ought to decide, indeed, to earn one...
JAMES BALDWIN
The universe, which is not merely the stars and the moon and the planets, flowers, grass and trees, ...
JAMES BALDWIN
In order for this to happen, your entire frame of reference will have to change, and you will be for...
JAMES BALDWIN
Colour is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.
JAMES BALDWIN
It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even ...
JAMES BALDWIN
I can't be a pessimist because I'm alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human li...
JAMES BALDWIN
No one knows very much about the life of another. This ignorance becomes vivid, if you love another....
JAMES BALDWIN
Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty o...
JAMES BALDWIN
I have met only a very few people - and most of these were not Americans - who had any real desire t...
JAMES BALDWIN
To accept one's past - one's history - is not the same things as drowning in it. An invented past ca...
JAMES BALDWIN
There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.
JAMES BALDWIN
When the white man came to Africa, the white man had the Bible and the African had the land, but now...
JAMES BALDWIN
All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by dro...
JAMES BALDWIN
You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for...
JAMES BALDWIN
I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it. And I know, which ...
JAMES BALDWIN
The impossible is the least that one can demand.
JAMES BALDWIN
The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed the collection of myths to which...
JAMES BALDWIN
Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?
JAMES BALDWIN
how can one respect, let alone adopt, the values of a people who do not, on any level whatever, live...
JAMES BALDWIN
Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immu...
JAMES BALDWIN
Whoever debases others is debasing himself.
JAMES BALDWIN
Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does ...
JAMES BALDWIN
Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use t...
JAMES BALDWIN
But it was not the room’s disorder which was frightening; it was the fact that when one began sear...
JAMES BALDWIN
People are continually pointing out to me the wretchedness of white people in order to console me fo...
JAMES BALDWIN
The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or sh...
JAMES BALDWIN
You write in order to change the world ... if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look a...
JAMES BALDWIN
I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do.
JAMES BALDWIN
People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And the...
JAMES BALDWIN
The future is like heaven, everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now.
JAMES BALDWIN
Perhaps he is a fool or a coward but almost everybody is one or the other and most people are both.
JAMES BALDWIN
Everybody's journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The ...
JAMES BALDWIN
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you ...
JAMES BALDWIN
The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
JAMES A. BALDWIN
Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
JAMES A. BALDWIN