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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

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James A. Baldwin
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More quotes by James A. Baldwin

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Life is more important than art that's what makes art important.
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It is impossible to pretend that you are not heir to, and therefore, however inadequately or unwillingly, responsible to, and for, the time and place that give you life -- without becoming, at very best, a dangerously disoriented human being.
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What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one's heroic ancestors. It's astounding to me, for example, that so many people really seem to believe that the country was founded by a band of heroes who wanted to be free.
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... every human being is an unprecedented miracle.
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In order for this to happen, your entire frame of reference will have to change, and you will be forced to surrender many things that you now scarcely know you have.
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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.
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Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.
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Women manage, quite brilliantly, on the whole, and to stunning and unforeseeable effect, to survive and surmount being defined by others. They dismiss the definition, however dangerous or wounding it may be-- or even, sometimes, find a way to utilize it.
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The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains.
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It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate.
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The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.
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The world's definitions are one thing and the life one actually lives is quite another. One cannot allow oneself, nor one's family, friends, or lovers - to say nothing of one's children - to live according to the world's definitions: one must find a way, perpetually, to be stronger and better than that.
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It was as though we were a picture, trapped in time: this had been happening for hundreds of years, people sitting in a room, waiting for dinner, and listening to the blues.
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One can only face in others what one can face in oneself.
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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.
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People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state on innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.
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I think Americans are terrified of feeling anything. I never met a people more infantile in my life.
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The American ideal is, after all, that everyone should be as much alike as possible.
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People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.
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You've got to tell the world how to treat you. If the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are in trouble.
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