James A. Baldwin Quotes - Page 10

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• Everybody's journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.

  James A. Baldwin

  Falling In Love, Gay, Boys

  21 Copy quote

• You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.

  James A. Baldwin

  Home, Left

  10 Copy quote

• An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.

  James A. Baldwin

  Identity, Use, Way

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• Passion is not friendly. It is arrogant, superbly contemptuous of all that is not itself, and, as they very definition of passion implies the impulse to freedom, it has a might intimidiating power. It contains a challenge. It contains an unspeakable hope.

  James A. Baldwin

  Passion, Challenges, Friendly

  8 Copy quote

• If you are going to be a writer there is nothing I can say to stop you; if you're not going to be a writer nothing I can say will help you. What you really need at the beginning is somebody to let you know that the effort is real.

  James A. Baldwin

  Real, Writing, Effort

  11 Copy quote

• The miracle is that some have stepped out of the rags of the Republic's definition to assume the great burden and glory of their humanity and their responsibility for one another. It is an extraordinary achievement to be trapped in the dungeon of color and to dare to shake down its walls and to step out of it leaving the jailkeeper in the rubble.

  James A. Baldwin

  Wall, Responsibility, Color

  10 Copy quote

• We do not trust educated people and rarely, alas, produce them, for we do not trust the independence of mind which alone makes a genuine education possible.

  James A. Baldwin

  People, Independence, Mind

  5 Copy quote

• Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore

  James A. Baldwin

  Luxury, Confusion, Young

  4 Copy quote

• The states of birth, suffering, love, and death, are extreme states: extreme, universal, and inescapable. We all know this, but we would rather not know it. The artist is present to correct the delusions to which we are all prey in our attempts to avoid this knowledge." - James Baldwin, "The Creative Process

  James A. Baldwin

  Artist, Creative, Suffering

  5 Copy quote

• No one knows very much about the life of another. This ignorance becomes vivid, if you love another. Love sets the imagination on fire, and, also, eventually, chars the imagination into a harder element: imagination cannot match love, cannot plunge so deep, or range so wide.

  James A. Baldwin

  Ignorance, Fire, Imagination

  5 Copy quote

• I will no longer take anyone's word for my experience.

  James A. Baldwin

  7 Copy quote

• Experience is a private, very largely speechless affair.

  James A. Baldwin

  Experience, Affair, Speechless

  5 Copy quote

• There exists among the intolerable degraded, the perverse and powerful desire to force into the arena of the actual those fantastic crimes of which they have been accused, achieving their vengeance and their own destruction through making the nightmare real.

  James A. Baldwin

  Powerful, Real, Evil

  7 Copy quote

• Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.

  James A. Baldwin

  White, People, Knows

  "The Fire Next Time". Book by James A. Baldwin, 1963.

  4 Copy quote

• All art is a kind of confession.

  James A. Baldwin

  Art, Kind, Confession

  "Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son". Book by James A. Baldwin, 1961.

  12 Copy quote

• We are very cruelly trapped between what we would like to be and what we actually are. And we cannot possibly become what we would like to be until we are willing to ask ourselves just why the lives we lead on this continent are mainly so empty, so tame, and so ugly.

  James A. Baldwin

  Ugly, Empty, Willing

  8 Copy quote

• I had never before thought of how awful the relationship must be between the musician and his instrument. He has to fill it, this instrument, with the breath of life, his own. He has to make it do what he wants it to do. And a piano is just a piano. It's made out of so much wood and wires and little hammers and big ones, and ivory. While there's only so much you can do with it, the only way to find this out is to try; to try and make it do everything.

  James A. Baldwin

  Ivory, Piano, Trying

  7 Copy quote

• The betrayal of a belief is not the same thing as ceasing to believe. If this were not so there would be no moral standards in the world at all.

  James A. Baldwin

  Betrayal, Believe, Would Be

  "Stranger in the Village". Harper's Magazine; republished in "Notes of a Native Son" (1955), October 1953.

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  James A. Baldwin

  Writing, Greed, Needs

  1961 Nobody Knows My Name,'Alas, Poor Richard'.

  8 Copy quote

• I remember standing on a street corner with the black painter Beauford Delaney down in the Village, waiting for the light to change, and he pointed down and said, 'Look.' I looked and all I saw was water. And he said, 'Look again,' which I did, and I saw oil on the water and the city reflected in the puddle. It was a great revelation to me. I can't explain it. He taught me how to see, and how to trust what I saw. Painters have often taught writers how to see. And once you've had that experience, you see differently.

  James A. Baldwin

  Writing, Light, Cities

  21 Copy quote

• When you're writing you're trying to find out something which you don't know.

  James A. Baldwin

  Writing, Trying, Knows

  "LGBTQ People Of Color Are Not Monolithic—In Reality Or Fiction" by Riley S. Wilson, www.huffingtonpost.com. July 13, 2015.

  8 Copy quote

• Hatred destroys the person who hates.

  James A. Baldwin

  Hate, Hatred, Persons

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• After departure, only invisible things are left, perhaps the life of the world is held together by invisible chains of memory and loss and love. So many things, so many people, depart! And we can only repossess them in our minds.

  James A. Baldwin

  Memories, Loss, People

  4 Copy quote

• We cannot discuss the state of our minorities until we first have some sense of what we are, who we are, what our goals are, and what we take life to be. The question is not what we can do now for the hypothetical Mexican, the hypothetical Negro. The question is what we really want out of life, for ourselves, what we think is real.

  James A. Baldwin

  Life, Real, Thinking

  12 Copy quote

• I was in his hands, he called me by the thunder at my ear. I was in his hands: I was being changed; all that I could do was cling to him. I did not realize, until I realized it, that I was also kissing him, that everything was breaking and changing and turning in me and moving toward him.

  James A. Baldwin

  Moving, Kissing, Hands

  5 Copy quote

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