You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.
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.
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
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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. BALDWIN -
Unless 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. BALDWIN -
I think Americans are terrified of feeling anything. I never met a people more infantile in my life.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
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 met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
One writes out of one thing only – one’s own experience.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
The determination to outwit one’s situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
The male cannot bear very much humiliation; and he really cannot bear it, it obliterates him.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
At four o’clock in the morning, when everyone is drunk enough, then extraordinary things can happen.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
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]
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
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 -
Rage can only with difficulty, and never entirely, be brought under the domination of the intelligence, and therefore is not susceptible to any arguments whatsoever.
JAMES A. BALDWIN