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.
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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It is very nearly impossible… to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
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There 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.
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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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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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, fire next time.
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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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You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
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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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It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.
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I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.
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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 determination to outwit one’s situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.
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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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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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN