I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.
JAMES A. BALDWINIt 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.
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
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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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The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
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You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.
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A man’s balance depends on the weight he carries between his legs.
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For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for whatthey become.
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The male cannot bear very much humiliation; and he really cannot bear it, it obliterates him.
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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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
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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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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Be careful what you set your heart upon – for it will surely be yours.
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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 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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You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
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You write in order to change the world.
JAMES A. BALDWIN