… every human being is an unprecedented miracle.
JAMES A. BALDWINAnd 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.
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
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One writes out of one thing only – one’s own experience.
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I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.
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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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A man’s balance depends on the weight he carries between his legs.
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Hatred destroys the person who hates.
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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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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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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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I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.
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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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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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You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
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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.
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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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN