If 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. BALDWINIt is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
-
-
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 -
You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
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 -
I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for whatthey become.
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 -
The reason people think it’s important to be white is that they think it’s important not to be black.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
One writes out of one thing only – one’s own experience.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
There is a ‘sanctity’ involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
A devotion to humanity is… too easily equated with a devotion to a Cause, and Causes, as we know, are notoriously bloodthirsty.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
At bottom, to be colored means that one has been caught in some utterly unbelievable cosmic joke, a joke so hideous and in such bad taste that it defeats all categories and definitions.
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







