The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
JAMES A. BALDWINYou don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
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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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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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The writer’s only real task: to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art
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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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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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If you think too far ahead, if you even try to think too far ahead, you’ll never make it.
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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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The determination to outwit one’s situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.
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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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Drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.
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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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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.
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The wretched of the earth do not decide to become extinct, they resolve, on the contrary, to multiply: life is their weapon against life, life is all that they have.
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Hatred destroys the person who hates.
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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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN