One writes out of one thing only – one’s own experience.
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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At four o’clock in the morning, when everyone is drunk enough, then extraordinary things can happen.
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You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
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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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Remember, to hate, to be violent, is demeaning. It means you’re afraid of the other side of the coin — to love and be loved.
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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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The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
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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.
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Be careful what you set your heart upon – for it will surely be yours.
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The determination to outwit one’s situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.
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I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.
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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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The male cannot bear very much humiliation; and he really cannot bear it, it obliterates him.
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Artists are here to disturb the peace.
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I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.
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For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for whatthey become.
JAMES A. BALDWIN







