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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I think Americans are terrified of feeling anything. I never met a people more infantile in my life.
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I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.
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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 -
Drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.
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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 -
The male cannot bear very much humiliation; and he really cannot bear it, it obliterates him.
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The purpose of education…is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions.
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It is very nearly impossible… to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
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 -
It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.
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Hatred destroys the person who hates.
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There is a ‘sanctity’ involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.
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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.
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 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