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. BALDWINIt 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.
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
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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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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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You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
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The determination to outwit one’s situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.
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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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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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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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The writer’s only real task: to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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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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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