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.
JAMES A. BALDWINThe determination to outwit one’s situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
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The male cannot bear very much humiliation; and he really cannot bear it, it obliterates him.
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I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.
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Life is more important than art; that’s what makes art important.
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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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Rage can only with difficulty, and never entirely, be brought under the domination of the intelligence, and therefore is not susceptible to any arguments whatsoever.
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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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At bottom, to be colored means that one has been caught in some utterly unbelievable cosmic joke, a joke so hideous and in such bad taste that it defeats all categories and definitions.
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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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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.
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One writes out of one thing only – one’s own experience.
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… every human being is an unprecedented miracle.
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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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When the South has trouble with its Negroes – when the Negroes refuse to remain in their “place” – it blames “outside agitators” and “Northern interference.” When the nation has trouble with the Northern Negro, it blames the Kremlin.
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The purpose of education…is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions.
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The writer’s only real task: to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art
JAMES A. BALDWIN