You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.
JAMES A. BALDWINI am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
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You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
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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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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.
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To accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.
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I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.
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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.
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For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for whatthey become.
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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
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 -
There is a ‘sanctity’ involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.
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You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
Life is more important than art; that’s what makes art important.
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… every human being is an unprecedented miracle.
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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







