The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
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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At four o’clock in the morning, when everyone is drunk enough, then extraordinary things can happen.
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The male cannot bear very much humiliation; and he really cannot bear it, it obliterates him.
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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 reason people think it’s important to be white is that they think it’s important not to be black.
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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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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 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 responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
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For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for whatthey become.
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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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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 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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Be careful what you set your heart upon – for it will surely be yours.
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Drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.
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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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN