You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.
JAMES A. BALDWINA man’s balance depends on the weight he carries between his legs.
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
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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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You think your pains and heartbreaks are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. [and then you discover that others have suffered much more than you and your problems look good in comparison]
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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 can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.
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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 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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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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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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The writer’s only real task: to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art
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You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
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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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One writes out of one thing only – one’s own experience.
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Artists are here to disturb the peace.
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At four o’clock in the morning, when everyone is drunk enough, then extraordinary things can happen.
JAMES A. BALDWIN