And I was yet aware that this was only a moment, that the world waited outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched above us, longer than the sky.
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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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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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.
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The reason people think it’s important to be white is that they think it’s important not to be black.
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The writer’s only real task: to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art
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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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I think Americans are terrified of feeling anything. I never met a people more infantile in my life.
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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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Artists are here to disturb the peace.
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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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I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.
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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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One writes out of one thing only – one’s own experience.
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I must oppose any attempt that Negroes may make to do to others what has been done to them. . . . I know the spiritual wasteland to which that road leads . . . whoever debases others is debasing himself.
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If the word ‘integration’ means anything, this is what it means that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.
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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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN