I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.
JAMES A. BALDWINBe careful what you set your heart upon – for it will surely be yours.
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
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The male cannot bear very much humiliation; and he really cannot bear it, it obliterates him.
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The writer’s greed is appalling. He wants, or seems to want, everything and practically everybody, in another sense, and at the same time, he needs no one at all.
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The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
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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 think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
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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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If the word ‘integration’ means anything, this is what it means that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.
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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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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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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 want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
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At four o’clock in the morning, when everyone is drunk enough, then extraordinary things can happen.
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Drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.
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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.
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I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.
JAMES A. BALDWIN