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Thank You For Existing
The poet or the revolutionary is there to articulate the necessity, but until the people themselves apprehend it, nothing can happen … Perhaps it can’t be done without the poet, but it certainly can’t be done without the people. The poet and the people get on generally very badly, and yet they need each other. The poet knows it sooner than the people do. The people usually know it after the poet is dead; but that’s all right. The point is to get your work done, and your work is to change the world.
…It seems to me that the artist’s struggle for his integrity must be considered as a kind of metaphor for the struggle, which is universal and daily, of all human beings on the face of this globe to get to become human beings.
— James Baldwin
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They will call you “crazy” because you are, because you were born with the gift of seeing things differently and that scares them…
They’re going to call you “selfish” because that’s right, because you found out that you’re the most important thing in your life and that doesn’t suit them.
You’re going to be called many things, with many judgments, for a long time, but stay firm in yourself and what you want, and I promise you one day they’re going to call you to say, “thank you for existing.”
