If you think too far ahead, if you even try to think too far ahead, you’ll never make it.
JAMES A. BALDWINThe male cannot bear very much humiliation; and he really cannot bear it, it obliterates him.
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
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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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Life is more important than art; that’s what makes art important.
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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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Artists are here to disturb the peace.
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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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It is very nearly impossible… to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
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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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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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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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You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
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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.
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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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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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN