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"There is an illusion about America, a myth about America to which we are clinging which has nothing to do with the lives we lead and I don't believe that anybody in this country who has really thought about it or really almost anybody who has been brought up against it--and almost all of us have one way or another--this collision between one's image of oneself and what one actually is is always very painful and there are two things you can do about it, you can meet the collision head-on and try and become what you really are or you can retreat and try to remain what you thought you were, which is a fantasy, in which you will certainly perish."
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"I don't think I've ever dared to write down what I see in the ruins of me, or tell in any detail the scars and all their secrets."
"Your mind is your world. Your heart is your nature. Your soul is your universe. Your life is your creation."
"Everything that goes into my mouth seems to make me fat, everything that comes out of my mouth embarrasses me."
"Oh, how clearly I see your faults! Such distinctly highlighted flaws; it's as if the sun and moon mean to keep them illuminated in my eyes. My mind is quick to spell out a simple remedy for those defects. But alas, poor me! My own faults-which I only assume to have because all do-are blurred and obscured by a mental fog. I've no eyes with which to gaze back at myself. The sun and moon refuse their illumination, and my mind offers no sure elixir but a complex recipe scribbled in foreign words I scarcely comprehend."
"I was just struggling with my inner vachette and pondering the depths of my own inhumanity."
"Sex is something I really don't understand too hot. You never know where the hell you are... Sex is something I just don't understand. I swear to God."
"I grab the pillows off the bed and chuck them at the reflection in the mirror of the girl I no longer know. I watch as the girl in the mirror stares back at me, sobbing pathetically. The weakness in her tears infuriates me."
"Knowing your strengths is intelligence, knowing your weakness is wisdom."
"When we constantly meditate on another's faults, it is because we are neglecting our own unhealed wounds."
"Behold, behold."
Explore more quotes by James Baldwin
"An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience."
"Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses."
"Whoever is born in New York is ill-equipped to deal with any other city: all other cities seem, at best, a mistake, and, at worst, a fraud. No other city is so spitefully incoherent. Whereas other cities flaunt there history - their presumed glory - in vividly placed monuments, squares, parks, plaques, and boulevards, such history as New York has been unable entirely to obliterate is to be found, mainly, in the backwaters of Wall Street, in the goat tracks of Old and West Broadway, in and around Washington Square, and, for the relentless searcher, in grimly inaccessible regions of The Bronx."
"Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society."
"I don't give a damn if there's any hope for them or not. But I know that I am not about to be bugged by any more white jokers who still can't figure out whether I'm human or not. If they don't know, baby, sad on them, and I hope they drop dead slowly, in great pain."
"I had been sent away to help guarantee and perpetuate this indifference. No one, here, knew what was happening anywhere else. Perhaps no one ever knows that, anywhere: wherever "here" may be, it must always happen "here" before it can be perceived to have happened. And then, it is not really perceived, it is simply endured. Out of this endurance come, for the most part, alas, monuments, legends, and lies. People cling to these in order to deny that what happened is always happening; that what happened is not an event skewered and immobilized by time, but a continuing and timeless mirror of ourselves."
"But to look back from the stony plain along the road which led one to that place is not at all the same thing as walking on the road; the perspective to say the very least, changes only with the journey; only when the road has, all abruptly and treacherously, and with an absoluteness that permits no argument, turned or dropped or risen is one able to see all that one could not have seen from any other place."
"It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story."
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