It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.
JAMES A. BALDWINIt is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.
JAMES A. BALDWINIf you think too far ahead, if you even try to think too far ahead, you’ll never make it.
JAMES A. BALDWINLife is more important than art; that’s what makes art important.
JAMES A. BALDWINYou write in order to change the world.
JAMES A. BALDWINAnd 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. BALDWINA devotion to humanity is… too easily equated with a devotion to a Cause, and Causes, as we know, are notoriously bloodthirsty.
JAMES A. BALDWINThe world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
JAMES A. BALDWINRemember, to hate, to be violent, is demeaning. It means you’re afraid of the other side of the coin — to love and be loved.
JAMES A. BALDWINThere is no way of conveying to the corpse the reasons you have made him one–you have the corpse, and you are, thereafter, at themercy of a fact which missed the truth, which means that the corpse has you.
JAMES A. BALDWINIf 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. BALDWINI 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.
JAMES A. BALDWINYou 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. BALDWINIt is very nearly impossible… to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
JAMES A. BALDWINI think Americans are terrified of feeling anything. I never met a people more infantile in my life.
JAMES A. BALDWINYou have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.
JAMES A. BALDWINI 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