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The writer’s only real task: to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art

James A. Baldwin

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

Becoming Giving Heirs
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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Humanity Justice Law
The male cannot bear very much humiliation; and he really cannot bear it, it obliterates him.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Bear Humiliation Male
If you think too far ahead, if you even try to think too far ahead, you’ll never make it.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Life Thinking Trying
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. BALDWIN

Clay Crack Past
There is a ‘sanctity’ involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Baby Funny Uplifting
Hatred destroys the person who hates.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Hate Hatred Person
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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Beats Blood Way
I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Believe Inspirational People
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

Fact Mean Way
When 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. BALDWIN

Blame Refuse Trouble
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

Emotion Home Leave Left Universe
The real victim of bigotry is the white man who hides his weakness under his myth of superiority.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Men Myth Real Superiority White
If the word ‘integration’ means anything, this is what it means that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Brother Mean Reality
You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Goal Want Writing
… every human being is an unprecedented miracle.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Human Miracle Unprecedented

The writer’s only real task: to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art

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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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