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The impossible is the least that one can demand.
James A. Baldwin
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James A. Baldwin
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More quotes by James A. Baldwin
Tell me, he said, What is this thing about time? Why is it better to be late than early? People are always saying, we must wait, we must wait. what are they waiting for? Well […] I guess people wait in order to make sure of what they feel. And when you have waited—-has it made you sure?
James A. Baldwin
Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always be seen as untimely. This is because a real writer is always shifting and changing and searching. The world has many labels for him, of which the most treacherous is the label of Success.
James A. Baldwin
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.
James A. Baldwin
Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.
James A. Baldwin
One day, to everyone’s astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up.
James A. Baldwin
You're getting to be a big boy,' I said desperately, 'it's time you started thinking about your future.' 'I'm thinking about my future,' said Sonny, grimly. 'I think about it all the time.
James A. Baldwin
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
The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.
James A. Baldwin
One writes out of one thing only - one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.
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
All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by drowning is all that awaits one there. It is for this reason that love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
James A. Baldwin
The establishment of democracy on the American continent was scarcely as radical a break with the past as was the necessity, which Americans faced, of broadening this concept to include black men.
James A. Baldwin
The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live here, and have lived here, are so ugly.
James A. Baldwin
A real writer is always shifting and changing and searching.
James A. Baldwin
The determination to outwit one's situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.
James A. Baldwin
It seems to be typical of life in America ... that the second generation has no time to talk to the first.
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
The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains.
James A. Baldwin
All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it.
James A. Baldwin
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.
James A. Baldwin
