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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]

James A. Baldwin

You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Goal Want Writing
The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Change Life Needs
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

Country Made People Philanthropy
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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Blame Refuse Trouble
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

Mean Race Taste
I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Believe Inspirational People
It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Mirror Order People
Remember, to hate, to be violent, is demeaning. It means you’re afraid of the other side of the coin — to love and be loved.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Coins Hate Mean
Hatred destroys the person who hates.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Hate Hatred Person
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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Brother Mean Reality
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

Fire Song Time
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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Anger Argument Rage
A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Children Education Teacher
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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Attention Eye Men
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

Becoming Giving Heirs
I think Americans are terrified of feeling anything. I never met a people more infantile in my life.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Feelings People Thinking

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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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]

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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