James A. Baldwin Quotes - Page 8

Quotes about:

• Man cannot live by profit alone.

  James A. Baldwin

  Men, Profit, Live By

  4 Copy quote

• You write in order to change the world ... if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.

  James A. Baldwin

  Change, Writing, Reality

  10 Copy quote

• No man is a devil in his own mind.

  James A. Baldwin

  Men, Mind, Devil

  47 Copy quote

• Love is like the lightning, and your maturity is signaled by the extent to which you can accept the dangers and the power and the beauty of love.

  James A. Baldwin

  Maturity, Love Is, Lightning

  4 Copy quote

• The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

  James A. Baldwin

  Writing, Responsibility, People

  "Biography / Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Society is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void, within which, like the earth before the Word was spoken, the foundations of society are hidden.

  James A. Baldwin

  Society, Together, Foundation

  9 Copy quote

• One can only face in others what one can face in oneself.

  James A. Baldwin

  Relationship, Faces, Oneself

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• There are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people.

  James A. Baldwin

  People, Heaven, Hatred

  "Fifth Avenue, Uptown: A Letter from Harlem". Essay by James A. Baldwin (1960), as quoted in "The Fire This Time" by David Remnick, www.newyorker.com. January 12, 2015.

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• It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian.

  James A. Baldwin

  Racism, Age, World

  16 Copy quote

• A real writer is always shifting and changing and searching.

  James A. Baldwin

  Real, Shifting

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• The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through.

  James A. Baldwin

  Knowing, Events

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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

  Song, Time, Fire

  "Letter from a Region in My Mind" by James Baldwin, www.newyorker.com. November 17, 1962.

  4 Copy quote

• But, when the chips are down, its better to be furious with someone you love, or frightened for someone you love, than be put through the merciless horror of being ashamed of someone you love.

  James A. Baldwin

  Someone You Love, Horror, Chips

  4 Copy quote

• All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.

  James A. Baldwin

  Art, Kindness, Survival

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

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• Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?

  James A. Baldwin

  Love, Romantic, Thinking

  55 Copy quote

• People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen forget.

  James A. Baldwin

  Pain, People, Hatred

  "Giovanni's Room". Book by James A. Baldwin, 1956.

  4 Copy quote

• What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one's heroic ancestors.

  James A. Baldwin

  America, Identity, Heroic

  "For the Love of God — and Country" by Bryan Berghoef, www.huffingtonpost.com. June 27, 2013.

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• The real victim of bigotry is the white man who hides his weakness under his myth of superiority.

  James A. Baldwin

  Real, Men, White Man

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• It will be hard James but you come from sturdy peasant stock men who picked cotton and dammed rivers and built railroads and in the teeth of the most terrifying odds achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity You come from a long line of great poets some of the greatest poets since Homer. One of them said "The very time I thought I was lost My dungeon shook and my chains fell off." You know and I know that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon. We cannot be free until they are free. God bless you James and Godspeed.

  James A. Baldwin

  Country, Men, Odds

  "A Letter to My Nephew" by James Baldwin, progressive.org. January 1, 1962.

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• The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.

  James A. Baldwin

  Black And White, People, Forever

  14 Copy quote

• To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.

  James A. Baldwin

  Respect, Thinking, Effort

  "Eighty-Five from the Archive: James Baldwin" by Erin Overbey, www.newyorker.com. February 11, 2010.

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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.

  James A. Baldwin

  Eye, Men, Attention

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• Somebody," said Jacques, "your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour - and in the oddest places! - for the lack of it.

  James A. Baldwin

  Father, Should Have, People

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• I really do believe in the New Jerusalem. I really do believe that we can all become better than we are. I know we can. But the price is enormous and people are not yet willing to pay it.

  James A. Baldwin

  Believe, People, Pay

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• Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did.

  James A. Baldwin

  Funny, Money, Sex

  "The Black Boy Looks at theWhite Boy" (1961)

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