You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
JAMES A. BALDWINYou 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]
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
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And I was yet aware that this was only a moment, that the world waited outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched above us, longer than the sky.
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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.
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The male cannot bear very much humiliation; and he really cannot bear it, it obliterates him.
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I think Americans are terrified of feeling anything. I never met a people more infantile in my life.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
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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Be careful what you set your heart upon – for it will surely be yours.
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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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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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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.
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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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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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… every human being is an unprecedented miracle.
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The real victim of bigotry is the white man who hides his weakness under his myth of superiority.
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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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You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.
JAMES A. BALDWIN