The male cannot bear very much humiliation; and he really cannot bear it, it obliterates him.
JAMES A. BALDWINIf you think too far ahead, if you even try to think too far ahead, you’ll never make it.
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
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One writes out of one thing only – one’s own experience.
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A man’s balance depends on the weight he carries between his legs.
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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.
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The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
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For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for whatthey become.
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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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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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Hatred destroys the person who hates.
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The determination to outwit one’s situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.
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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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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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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 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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The real victim of bigotry is the white man who hides his weakness under his myth of superiority.
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I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.
JAMES A. BALDWIN