Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did - which was to hide.
James A. Baldwin
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
James A. Baldwin
Young
Siberia
Think
Hide
Thinking
Tend
Failure
Line
Lines
Living
Siberian
Ends
Banishment
More quotes by James A. Baldwin
There are people in the world for whom coming along is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.
James A. Baldwin
Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.
James A. Baldwin
An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.
James A. Baldwin
All racists are irresponsible.
James A. Baldwin
Yet I also suspected that what I was seeing was but a part of the truth and perhaps not even the most important part beneath these faces, these clothes, accents, rudenesses, was power and sorrow, both unadmitted, unrealized, the power of inventors, the sorrow of the disconnected.
James A. Baldwin
It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.
James A. Baldwin
People don't have any mercy. They tear you limb from limb, in the name of love. Then, when you're dead, when they've killed you by what they made you go through, they say you didn't have any character. They weep big, bitter tears - not for you. For themselves, because they've lost their toy.
James A. Baldwin
It is a very grave matter to be forced to imitate a people for whom you know-which is the price of your performance and survival-you do not exist. It is hard to imitate a people whose existence appears, mainly, to be made tolerable by their bottomless gratitude that they are not, thank heaven, you.
James A. Baldwin
People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.
James A. Baldwin
I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.
James A. Baldwin
There are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people.
James A. Baldwin
Our dehumanization of the Negro then is indivisible from our dehumanization of ourselves the loss of our own identity is the price we pay for our annulment of his.
James A. Baldwin
Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
James A. Baldwin
It is hard for anyone under twenty to realise that death has already assigned them a number, which is going to come up one day.
James A. Baldwin
If all you want to do is make money, the very last thing you need is imagination.
James A. Baldwin
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
If you're afraid to die, you will not be able to live.
James A. Baldwin
He may be a very nice man. But I haven't got the time to figure that out. All I know is, he's got a uniform and a gun and I have to relate to him that way. That's the only way to relate to him because one of us may have to die.
James A. Baldwin
Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.
James A. Baldwin
In order to have a conversation with someone you must reveal yourself.
James A. Baldwin