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James Baldwin Quotes
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It is only because the world looks on his talent with such a frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make his talent important.
James Baldwin
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Negro servants have been smuggling odds and ends out of white homes for generations, and white people have been delighted to have them do it, because it has assuaged a dim guilt and testified to the intrinsic superiority of white people.
James Baldwin
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You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
James Baldwin
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There was no room in God's army for the coward heart, no crown awaiting him who put mother or father, sister or brother, sweetheart or friend above God's will. Let the church cry amen to this!
James Baldwin
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Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel.
James Baldwin
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An identity is questioned only when it is menaced, as when the mighty begin to fall, or when the wretched begin to rise, or when the stranger enters the gates, never, thereafter, to be a stranger.
James Baldwin
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The hope of the world lies in what one demands, not of others, but of oneself.
James Baldwin
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One day, to everyone's astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up.
James Baldwin
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A writer has to take all the risks of putting down what he sees.
James Baldwin
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I stand at the window of this great house in the south of France as night falls, the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life.
James Baldwin
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If one can live with one's own pain then one respects the pain of others, and so, briefly, but transcendentally, we can release each other from pain.
James Baldwin
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And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time, and furthermore, to win.
James Baldwin
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I'm beginning to think that maybe everything that happens makes sense. Like, if it didn't make sense, how could it happen?
James Baldwin
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All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it.
James Baldwin
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This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.
James Baldwin
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When the Negro hates the Jew as a Jew he does so partly because the nation does and in much the same painful fashion that he hates himself. It is an aspect of his humiliation, whittled down to a manageable size and then transferred; it is the best form the Negro has for tabulating vocally his long record of grievances against his native land.
James Baldwin
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A civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.
James Baldwin
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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.
James Baldwin
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My face is like a face you have seen many times.
James Baldwin
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You don't need numbers; you need passion, and this is proven by the history of the world!
James Baldwin
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There is no way of conveying to the corpse the reasons you have made him one--you have the corpse, and you are, thereafter, at themercy of a fact which missed the truth, which means that the corpse has you.
James Baldwin
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I do not wish to see Negroes become the equal of their murderers. I wish us to become equal to ourselves. To become a people so free in themselves that they will have no need to—fear— others—and have no need to murder others.
James Baldwin
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Even the most incorrigible maverick has to be born somewhere. He may leave the group that produced him-he may be forced to-but nothing will efface his origins, the marks of which he carries with him everywhere. I think it is important to know this and even find it a matter for rejoicing, as the strongest people do, regardless of their station. On this acceptance, literally, the life of a writer depends.
James Baldwin
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It is said that the camera cannot lie, but rarely do we allow it to do anything else, since the camera sees what you point it at: the camera sees what you want it to see.
James Baldwin
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It seems to be typical of life in America... that the second generation has no time to talk to the first.
James Baldwin
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Quote of the day
Joy is like restless day; but peace divine Like quiet night; Lead me, O Lord, — till perfect Day shall shine Through Peace to Light.
Adelaide Anne Procter
James Baldwin
Creative Commons
Born:
August 2, 1924
Died:
December 1, 1987
(aged 63)
Bio:
James Arthur Baldwin was an African American novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic.
Known for:
Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)
The Fire Next Time (1963)
Giovanni's Room (1956)
Notes of a Native Son (1955)
Another Country (1962)
Most used words:
people
life
love
time
white
man
negro
country
reality
true
american
black
freedom
experience
order
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