You think your pains and heartbreaks are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. [and then you discover that others have suffered much more than you and your problems look good in comparison]
JAMES A. BALDWINYou want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
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Be careful what you set your heart upon – for it will surely be yours.
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The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
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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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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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If you think too far ahead, if you even try to think too far ahead, you’ll never make it.
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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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Hatred destroys the person who hates.
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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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I think Americans are terrified of feeling anything. I never met a people more infantile in my life.
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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 male cannot bear very much humiliation; and he really cannot bear it, it obliterates him.
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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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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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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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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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN