The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
JAMES A. BALDWIN… every human being is an unprecedented miracle.
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
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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.
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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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I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.
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Hatred destroys the person who hates.
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There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.
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You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
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The writer’s greed is appalling. He wants, or seems to want, everything and practically everybody, in another sense, and at the same time, he needs no one at 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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Life is more important than art; that’s what makes art important.
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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.
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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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A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
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You write in order to change the world.
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The male cannot bear very much humiliation; and he really cannot bear it, it obliterates him.
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It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.
JAMES A. BALDWIN