JAMES BALDWIN

"Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced."

"To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time."

"Everyone wishes to be loved, but in the event, nearly no one can bear it. Everyone desires love but also finds it impossible to believe that he deserves it."

"Colour is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality."

"Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up."

"Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?"

"I want to be an honest man and a good writer."

"The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose."

"The moment we cease to hold each other, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out."

"You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back."

"It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have."

"No man is a devil in his own mind."

"People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception."

"Literature is indispensable to the world."

"I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do."

"I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain."

"Perhaps he is a fool or a coward but almost everybody is one or the other and most people are both."

"Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind."

"The impossible is the least that one can demand."

"Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore."

"Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know."

"People can cry much easier than they can change."

"For nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom."

"The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains."

"It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive."

"Love brought you here. If you trusted love this far, don't panic now."

"Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch."

"Love was a country he knew nothing about."

"Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black."

"Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety."

"We all commit our crimes. The thing is to not lie about them."

"Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity."

"People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted."

"Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law."

"All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it."

"People don't have any mercy. They tear you limb from limb, in the name of love."

"Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go."

"The place in which I'll fit will not exist until I make it."

"You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don't live the only life you have, you won't live some other life, you won't live any life at all."

"Guilt is a luxury that we can no longer afford."

"Those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by others doing it."

"Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark."

"The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat."

"If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are."

"No one is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart: for his purity, by definition, is unassailable."

"People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned."