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.
JAMES A. BALDWINThere 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.
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
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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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One writes out of one thing only – one’s own experience.
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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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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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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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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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Be careful what you set your heart upon – for it will surely be yours.
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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.
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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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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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Hatred destroys the person who hates.
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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.
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I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.
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A devotion to humanity is… too easily equated with a devotion to a Cause, and Causes, as we know, are notoriously bloodthirsty.
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You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
JAMES A. BALDWIN