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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.

James A. Baldwin

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

People Responsibility Writing
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
The male cannot bear very much humiliation; and he really cannot bear it, it obliterates him.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Bear Humiliation Male
The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Change Life Needs
Be careful what you set your heart upon – for it will surely be yours.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Broken Heart Inspirational Success
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
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
A man’s balance depends on the weight he carries between his legs.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Balance Men Weight
You write in order to change the world.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Order World 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
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
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

Sky Trouble World
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

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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Popular Authors

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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More James A. Baldwin Quotes