Artists are here to disturb the peace.
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 real victim of bigotry is the white man who hides his weakness under his myth of superiority.
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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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One writes out of one thing only – one’s own experience.
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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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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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If you think too far ahead, if you even try to think too far ahead, you’ll never make it.
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You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
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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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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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There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man. What is left of that man flees from what is left of human attention.
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I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.
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A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
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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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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 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.
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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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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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You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
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Drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.
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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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You write in order to change the world.
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I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.
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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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It is very nearly impossible… to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
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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