The writer’s greed is appalling. He wants, or seems to want, everything and practically everybody, in another sense, and at the same time, he needs no one at all.
JAMES A. BALDWINTo 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.
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
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You think your pains and heartbreaks are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. [and then you discover that others have suffered much more than you and your problems look good in comparison]
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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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I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.
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Life is more important than art; that’s what makes art important.
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I must oppose any attempt that Negroes may make to do to others what has been done to them. . . . I know the spiritual wasteland to which that road leads . . . whoever debases others is debasing himself.
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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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You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
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The writer’s only real task: to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art
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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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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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At four o’clock in the morning, when everyone is drunk enough, then extraordinary things can happen.
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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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It is a terrible, an inexorable, law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one’s own: in the face of one’s victim, one sees oneself.
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Drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.
JAMES A. BALDWIN