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I remembered his older brother, who had died in Sicily, in battle for the free world- he had barely had time to see Sicily before he died and had assuredly never seen the free world.


James Baldwin

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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 I must—to be honest—add that my ministry almost certainly helped me through my adolescence by gi...
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