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You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.

James A. Baldwin

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Empathy Pain Thinking
I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Country Made People Philanthropy
The reason people think it’s important to be white is that they think it’s important not to be black.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Racism Thinking White
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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Blessing Future Time
One writes out of one thing only – one’s own experience.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

One Thing Writing
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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Fire Song Time
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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Coins Hate Mean
It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Mirror Order People
Hatred destroys the person who hates.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Hate Hatred Person
I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Country Discovery People Travel
You write in order to change the world.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Order World Writing
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

Done May People Spiritual
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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Attention Eye Men
It is very nearly impossible… to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Country Education Independent
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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Mean Race Taste
A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Children Education Teacher
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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Humanity Justice Law
The real victim of bigotry is the white man who hides his weakness under his myth of superiority.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Men Myth Real Superiority White
For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for whatthey become.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Children Pay Profit
The writer’s only real task: to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Art Order Real
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

Becoming Giving Heirs
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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Beats Blood Way
You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Force Idea World
The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

People Responsibility Writing
If you think too far ahead, if you even try to think too far ahead, you’ll never make it.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Life Thinking Trying
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. BALDWIN

Clay Crack Past
At four o’clock in the morning, when everyone is drunk enough, then extraordinary things can happen.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Drunk Morning Wine

You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.

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You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.

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