There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man. What is left of that man flees from what is left of human attention.
JAMES A. BALDWINWhen 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.
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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You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
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One writes out of one thing only – one’s own experience.
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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 write in order to change the world.
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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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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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A man’s balance depends on the weight he carries between his legs.
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Be careful what you set your heart upon – for it will surely be yours.
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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.
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The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
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You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
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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.
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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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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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN