The writer’s only real task: to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art
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.
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
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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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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.
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You write in order to change the world.
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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.
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It is very nearly impossible… to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
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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.
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Life is more important than art; that’s what makes art important.
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If you think too far ahead, if you even try to think too far ahead, you’ll never make it.
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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.
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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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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.
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A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
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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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… every human being is an unprecedented miracle.
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If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.
JAMES A. BALDWIN