You write in order to change the world.
JAMES A. BALDWINAt 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.
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
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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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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.
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If you think too far ahead, if you even try to think too far ahead, you’ll never make it.
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For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for whatthey become.
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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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There is no way of conveying to the corpse the reasons you have made him one–you have the corpse, and you are, thereafter, at themercy of a fact which missed the truth, which means that the corpse has you.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
The determination to outwit one’s situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.
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Life is more important than art; that’s what makes art important.
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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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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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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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
Hatred destroys the person who hates.
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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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN






