And I was yet aware that this was only a moment, that the world waited outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched above us, longer than the sky.
JAMES A. BALDWINI am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
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It is very nearly impossible… to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
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Life is more important than art; that’s what makes art important.
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A devotion to humanity is… too easily equated with a devotion to a Cause, and Causes, as we know, are notoriously bloodthirsty.
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Be careful what you set your heart upon – for it will surely be yours.
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The determination to outwit one’s situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.
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Artists are here to disturb the peace.
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You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.
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To accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.
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It is impossible to pretend that you are not heir to, and therefore, however inadequately or unwillingly, responsible to, and for, the time and place that give you life — without becoming, at very best, a dangerously disoriented human being.
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You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
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There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man. What is left of that man flees from what is left of human attention.
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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.
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The wretched of the earth do not decide to become extinct, they resolve, on the contrary, to multiply: life is their weapon against life, life is all that they have.
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Drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.
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Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always seem untimely.
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The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
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If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, fire next time.
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I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.
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There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.
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There is a ‘sanctity’ involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.
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The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
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Remember, to hate, to be violent, is demeaning. It means you’re afraid of the other side of the coin — to love and be loved.
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It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.
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I think Americans are terrified of feeling anything. I never met a people more infantile in my life.
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The reason people think it’s important to be white is that they think it’s important not to be black.
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If the word ‘integration’ means anything, this is what it means that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.
JAMES A. BALDWIN