James Baldwin

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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

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Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition

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Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within

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Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death--ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return

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I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually