A man’s balance depends on the weight he carries between his legs.
JAMES A. BALDWINThere 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.
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
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One writes out of one thing only – one’s own experience.
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I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.
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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.
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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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Hatred destroys the person who hates.
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For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for whatthey become.
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If the word ‘integration’ means anything, this is what it means that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.
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The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
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… every human being is an unprecedented miracle.
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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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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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Be careful what you set your heart upon – for it will surely be yours.
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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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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