Quote by James Baldwin
When the book comes out it may hurt you -- but in order for me to

When the book comes out it may hurt you — but in order for me to do it, it had to hurt me first. I can only tell you about yourself as much as I can face about myself. – James Baldwin

Other quotes by James Baldwin

Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the battle field. – James Baldwin

Category:
America
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Words like freedom, justice, democracy are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous and, above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply. – James Baldwin

Category:
Humanity
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Society is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void, within which, like the earth before the Word was spoken, the foundations of society are hidden. – James Baldwin

Category:
Society
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Other Quotes from
Reading
category

A wicked book cannot repent. – Proverb

Category:
Reading

Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow testicular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library. – Nicholson Baker

Category:
Reading

Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered. – W. H. Auden

Category:
Reading

Books are men of higher stature; the only men that speak aloud for future times to hear. – E.S. Barrett

Category:
Reading

Random Quotes

A happy arrangement: many people prefer cats to other people, and many cats prefer people to other cats. – Mason Cooley

Category:
pet

If the terrorists have the sympathy of people, its much harder to find them. So we need people on our side, and that leads us to be responsible leaders of the world, show some concern with the problems. – George Soros

Category:
Sympathy

Trust is the first step to love. – Munshi Premchand

Category:
Trust

I find in working always the disturbing intrusion of elements not a part of my most interested vision, and the inevitable obliteration and replacement of this vision by the work itself as it proceeds. – Edward Hopper

Category:
work