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.
JAMES A. BALDWINAt four o’clock in the morning, when everyone is drunk enough, then extraordinary things can happen.
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
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One writes out of one thing only – one’s own experience.
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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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Drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.
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Be careful what you set your heart upon – for it will surely be yours.
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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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You write in order to change the world.
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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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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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There is a ‘sanctity’ involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.
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For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for whatthey become.
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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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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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The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
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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