At four o’clock in the morning, when everyone is drunk enough, then extraordinary things can happen.
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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If you think too far ahead, if you even try to think too far ahead, you’ll never make it.
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You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live some other life, you won’t live any life at all.
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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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Hatred destroys the person who hates.
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Life is more important than art; that’s what makes art important.
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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 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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For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for whatthey become.
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There 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.
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The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
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Drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.
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… every human being is an unprecedented miracle.
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One writes out of one thing only – one’s own experience.
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You write in order to change the world.
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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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN






