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I often wonder what I'd do if there weren't any books in the world.
James A. Baldwin
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James A. Baldwin
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More quotes by James A. Baldwin
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
The trick is to love somebody.... If you love one person, you see everybody else differently.
James A. Baldwin
A person does not lightly elect to oppose his society. One would much rather be at home among one's compatriots than be mocked and detested by them. And there is a level on which the mockery of people, even their hatred, is moving, because it is so blind: It is terrible to watch people cling to their captivity and insist on their own destruction.
James A. Baldwin
Heavenly witnesses are a tricky lot, to be used by whoever is closest to Heaven at the time. And legend and theology, which are designed to sanctify our fears, crimes, and aspirations, also reveal them for what they are.
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
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
You write in order to change the world.
James A. Baldwin
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
A devotion to humanity is... too easily equated with a devotion to a Cause, and Causes, as we know, are notoriously bloodthirsty.
James A. Baldwin
Europe has what we [Americans] do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a sense of life's possibilities.
James A. Baldwin
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
It seems to be typical of life in America ... that the second generation has no time to talk to the first.
James A. Baldwin
Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.
James A. Baldwin
There is a 'sanctity' involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.
James A. Baldwin
Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
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
There are people in the world for whom coming along is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.
James A. Baldwin
The greatest significance of the present student generation is that it is through them that the point of view of the subjugated is finally and inexorably being expressed.
James A. Baldwin
God be thanked for books! They are the voices of the distant and the dead.
James A. Baldwin
Words like freedom, justice, democracy are not common concepts on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous and, above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply.
James A. Baldwin