I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.
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
-
-
The determination to outwit one’s situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
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 -
I think Americans are terrified of feeling anything. I never met a people more infantile in my life.
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 -
There is a ‘sanctity’ involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.
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 -
If you think too far ahead, if you even try to think too far ahead, you’ll never make it.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
You write in order to change the world.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
One writes out of one thing only – one’s own experience.
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 -
… every human being is an unprecedented miracle.
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