The determination to outwit one’s situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.
JAMES A. BALDWINIf 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.
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
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For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for whatthey become.
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When the South has trouble with its Negroes – when the Negroes refuse to remain in their “place” – it blames “outside agitators” and “Northern interference.” When the nation has trouble with the Northern Negro, it blames the Kremlin.
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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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Be careful what you set your heart upon – for it will surely be yours.
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You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
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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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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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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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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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One writes out of one thing only – one’s own experience.
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A devotion to humanity is… too easily equated with a devotion to a Cause, and Causes, as we know, are notoriously bloodthirsty.
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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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN