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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.

James A. Baldwin

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

Humanity Justice Law
The male cannot bear very much humiliation; and he really cannot bear it, it obliterates him.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Bear Humiliation Male
The real victim of bigotry is the white man who hides his weakness under his myth of superiority.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Men Myth Real Superiority White
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. BALDWIN

Beats Blood Way
The reason people think it’s important to be white is that they think it’s important not to be black.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Racism Thinking White
One writes out of one thing only – one’s own experience.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

One Thing Writing
At bottom, to be colored means that one has been caught in some utterly unbelievable cosmic joke, a joke so hideous and in such bad taste that it defeats all categories and definitions.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Mean Race Taste
It is very nearly impossible… to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Country Education Independent
I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Country Discovery People Travel
Remember, to hate, to be violent, is demeaning. It means you’re afraid of the other side of the coin — to love and be loved.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Coins Hate Mean
The wretched of the earth do not decide to become extinct, they resolve, on the contrary, to multiply: life is their weapon against life, life is all that they have.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Earth Life Weapons
The writer’s only real task: to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Art Order Real
I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Believe Inspirational People
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]
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Gratitude Pain Thinking
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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Becoming Giving Heirs
At four o’clock in the morning, when everyone is drunk enough, then extraordinary things can happen.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Drunk Morning Wine

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More James A. Baldwin Quotes