The writer’s only real task: to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art
JAMES A. BALDWINThe male cannot bear very much humiliation; and he really cannot bear it, it obliterates him.
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
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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 have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.
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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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You write in order to change the world.
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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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The purpose of education…is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions.
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Be careful what you set your heart upon – for it will surely be yours.
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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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Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always seem untimely.
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You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
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At four o’clock in the morning, when everyone is drunk enough, then extraordinary things can happen.
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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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I 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 -
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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… every human being is an unprecedented miracle.
JAMES A. BALDWIN