At four o’clock in the morning, when everyone is drunk enough, then extraordinary things can happen.
JAMES A. BALDWINYou 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.
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
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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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I think Americans are terrified of feeling anything. I never met a people more infantile in my life.
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… every human being is an unprecedented miracle.
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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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Hatred destroys the person who hates.
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I must oppose any attempt that Negroes may make to do to others what has been done to them. . . . I know the spiritual wasteland to which that road leads . . . whoever debases others is debasing himself.
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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.
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Rage can only with difficulty, and never entirely, be brought under the domination of the intelligence, and therefore is not susceptible to any arguments whatsoever.
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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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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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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 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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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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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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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