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. BALDWINAnd 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.
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
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Drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.
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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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The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
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You write in order to change the world.
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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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The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
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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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The writer’s only real task: to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art
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… every human being is an unprecedented miracle.
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Hatred destroys the person who hates.
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The purpose of education…is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions.
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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. BALDWIN -
I think Americans are terrified of feeling anything. I never met a people more infantile in my life.
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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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN