The writer’s only real task: to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art
JAMES A. BALDWINThere 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.
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
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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 responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
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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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At four o’clock in the morning, when everyone is drunk enough, then extraordinary things can happen.
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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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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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At bottom, to be colored means that one has been caught in some utterly unbelievable cosmic joke, a joke so hideous and in such bad taste that it defeats all categories and definitions.
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You 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]
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The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
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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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It is very nearly impossible… to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
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The real victim of bigotry is the white man who hides his weakness under his myth of superiority.
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… every human being is an unprecedented miracle.
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If you think too far ahead, if you even try to think too far ahead, you’ll never make it.
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It is impossible to pretend that you are not heir to, and therefore, however inadequately or unwillingly, responsible to, and for, the time and place that give you life — without becoming, at very best, a dangerously disoriented human being.
JAMES A. BALDWIN