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.
JAMES A. BALDWINTo 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.
JAMES A. BALDWINIt 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. BALDWINThe writer’s only real task: to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art
JAMES A. BALDWINRemember, to hate, to be violent, is demeaning. It means you’re afraid of the other side of the coin — to love and be loved.
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.
JAMES A. BALDWINHatred destroys the person who hates.
JAMES A. BALDWIN… every human being is an unprecedented miracle.
JAMES A. BALDWINWhen the South has trouble with its Negroes – when the Negroes refuse to remain in their “place” – it blames “outside agitators” and “Northern interference.” When the nation has trouble with the Northern Negro, it blames the Kremlin.
JAMES A. BALDWINAt four o’clock in the morning, when everyone is drunk enough, then extraordinary things can happen.
JAMES A. BALDWINDrive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.
JAMES A. BALDWINIf we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, fire next time.
JAMES A. BALDWINUnless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always seem untimely.
JAMES A. BALDWINYou think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
JAMES A. BALDWINI can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.
JAMES A. BALDWINThe purpose of education…is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions.
JAMES A. BALDWINThe world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
JAMES A. BALDWIN