There 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. BALDWIN… every human being is an unprecedented miracle.
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
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Rage can only with difficulty, and never entirely, be brought under the domination of the intelligence, and therefore is not susceptible to any arguments whatsoever.
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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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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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… every human being is an unprecedented miracle.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
The writer’s only real task: to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art
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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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The male cannot bear very much humiliation; and he really cannot bear it, it obliterates him.
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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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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.
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You write in order to change the world.
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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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It is very nearly impossible… to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
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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If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, fire next time.
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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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN