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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

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All Art Is A

James A. Baldwin

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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.

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For Nothing Is Fixed, Forever And Forever, It Is Not Fixed; The Earth Is Always Shifting, The Light Is Always Changing, The Sea Does Not Cease To Grind Down Rock. Generations Do Not Cease To Be Born, And We Are Responsible To Them Because We Are The Only Witnesses They Have. The Sea Rises, The Light Fails, Lovers Cling To Each Other And Children Cling To Us. The Moment We Cease To Hold Each Other, The Moment We Break Faith With One Another, The Sea Engulfs Us And The Light Goes Out.

The Victim Who Is Able To Articulate The Situation Of The Victim Has Ceased To Be A Victim: He Or She Has Become A Threat.

The Writer's Greed Is Appalling. He Wants, Or Seems To Want, Everything And Practically Everybody, In Another Sense, And At The Same Time, He Needs No One At All.

Rage Can Only With Difficulty, And Never Entirely, Be Brought Under The Domination Of The Intelligence, And Therefore Is Not Susceptible To Any Arguments Whatsoever.

People Said That He Was Very Nice, But I Confess That His Utter Grotesqueness Made Me Uneasy; Perhaps In The Same Way That The Sight Of Monkeys Eating Their Own Excrement Turns Some People’s Stomachs. They Might Not Mind So Much If Monkeys Did Not- So Grotesquely- Resemble Human Beings.

Hatred Is Always Self Hatred, And There Is Something Suicidal About It.

And I Was Yet Aware That This Was Only A Moment, That The World Waited Outside, As Hungry As A Tiger, And That Trouble Stretched Above Us, Longer Than The Sky.

It Is Very Nearly Impossible... To Become An Educated Person In A Country So Distrustful Of The Independent Mind.

It Seems To Be Typical Of Life In America ... That The Second Generation Has No Time To Talk To The First.

It Happened, As Many Things Do, Imperceptibly, In Many Ways At Once. I Date It - The Slow Crumbling Of My Faith, The Pulverization Of My Fortress - From The Time, About A Year After I Had Begun To Preach, When I Began To Read Again. I Justified This Desire By The Fact That I Was Still In School, And I Began, Fatally, With Dostoyevsky.

I Often Wonder What I'd Do If There Weren't Any Books In The World.

Fires Can't Be Made With Dead Embers, Nor Can Enthusiasm Be Stirred By Spiritless Men. Enthusiasm In Our Daily Work Lightens Effort And Turns Even Labor Into Pleasant Tasks.

Everything Now, We Must Assume, Is In Our Hands; We Have No Right To Assume Otherwise. If We Do Not Falter In Our Duty Now, We May Be Able, Handful That We Are, To End The Racial Nightmare, And Achieve Our Country, And Change The History Of The World.

I Am Aware That No Man Is A Villain In His Own Eyes.

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.

If You Think Too Far Ahead, If You Even Try To Think Too Far Ahead, You'll Never Make It.

Perhaps Home Is Not A Place But Simply An Irrevocable Condition.

European Society Has Always Been Divided Into Classes In A Way That American Society Never Has Been. A European Writer Considers Himself To Be Part Of An Old And Honorable Tradition--of Intellectual Activity, Of Letters--and His Choice Of A Vocation Does Not Cause Him Any Uneasy Wonder As To Whether Or Not It Will Cost Him All His Friends. But This Tradition Does Not Exist In America.

There Was No Room In God's Army For The Coward Heart, No Crown Awaiting Him Who Put Mother Or Father, Sister Or Brother, Sweetheart Or Friend Above God's Will. Let The Church Cry Amen To This!

Experience Is A Private, Very Largely Speechless Affair.

One Writes Out Of One Thing Only - One's Own Experience.

People Can't, Unhappily, Invent Their Mooring Posts, Their Lovers And Their Friends, Anymore Than They Can Invent Their Parents. Life Gives These And Also Takes Them Away And The Great Difficulty Is To Say Yes To Life.

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.

You Think Your Pain And Your Heartbreak Are Unprecedented In The History Of The World, But Then You Read. It Was Dostoevsky And Dickens Who 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 Ever Had Been Alive. Only If We Face These Open Wounds In Ourselves Can We Understand Them In Other People.

I Was Guilty And Irritated And Full Of Love And Pain. I Wanted To Kick Him And I Wanted To Take Him In My Arms.

It Is A Very Rare Man Who Does Not Victimize The Helpless.

The Price One Pays For Pursuing Any Profession Or Calling Is An Intimate Knowledge Of Its Ugly Side.

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.

I Conceive Of God, In Fact, As A Means Of Liberation And Not A Means To Control Others.

The Occurrence Of An Event Is Not The Same Thing As Knowing What It Is That One Has Lived Through.

When One Begins To Live By Habit And By Quotation, One Has Begun To Stop Living.

But It Was Not The Room’s Disorder Which Was Frightening; It Was The Fact That When One Began Searching For The Key To This Disorder, One Realized That It Was Not To Be Found In Any Of The Usual Places. For This Was Not A Matter Of Habit Or Circumstance Or Temperament; It Was A Matter Of Punishment And Grief.

Not Everything That Is Faced Can Be Changed. But Nothing Can Be Changed Until It Is Faced.

Love Him And Let Him Love You. Do You Think Anything Else Under Heaven Really Matters?

I Must Oppose Any Attempt That Negroes May Make To Do To Others What Has Been Done To Them. . . . I Know The Spiritual Wasteland To Which That Road Leads . . . Whoever Debases Others Is Debasing Himself.

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.

We Do Not Trust Educated People And Rarely, Alas, Produce Them, For We Do Not Trust The Independence Of Mind Which Alone Makes A Genuine Education Possible.

You Go Into A Book And You're In The Dark, Really. You Go In With A Certain Fear And Trembling. You Know One Thing. You Know You Will Not Be The Same Person When This Voyage Is Over. But You Don't Know What's Going To Happen To You Between Getting On The Boat And Stepping Off.

I'm Not Interested In Anybody's Guilt. Guilt Is A Luxury That We Can No Longer Afford. I Know You Didn't Do It, And I Didn't Do It Either, But I Am Responsible For It Because I Am A Man And A Citizen Of This Country And You Are Responsible For It, Too, For The Very Same Reason... Anyone Who Is Trying To Be Conscious Must Begin To Dismiss The Vocabulary Which We've Used So Long To Cover It Up, To Lie About The Way Things Are.

Passion Is Not Friendly. It Is Arrogant, Superbly Contemptuous Of All That Is Not Itself, And, As They Very Definition Of Passion Implies The Impulse To Freedom, It Has A Might Intimidiating Power. It Contains A Challenge. It Contains An Unspeakable Hope.

Most Of Us, No Matter What We Say, Are Walking In The Dark, Whistling In The Dark. Nobody Knows What Is Going To Happen To Him From One Moment To The Next, Or How One Will Bear It. This Is Irreducible. And It's True Of Everybody. Now, It Is True That The Nature Of Society Is To Create, Among Its Citizens, An Illusion Of Safety; But It Is Also Absolutely True That The Safety Is Always Necessarily An Illusion. Artists Are Here To Disturb The Peace.

American History Is Longer, Larger, More Various, More Beautiful, And More Terrible Than Anything Anyone Has Ever Said About It.

American History

There Is No Way Of Conveying To The Corpse The Reasons You Have Made Him One--you Have The Corpse, And You Are, Thereafter, At Themercy Of A Fact Which Missed The Truth, Which Means That The Corpse Has You.

At Bottom, To Be Colored Means That One Has Been Caught In Some Utterly Unbelievable Cosmic Joke, A Joke So Hideous And In Such Bad Taste That It Defeats All Categories And Definitions.

The Sea Rises, The Light Fails, Lovers Cling To Each Other And Children Cling To Us. The Moment We Cease To Hold Each Other, The Moment We Break Faith With One Another, The Sea Engulfs Us And The Light Goes Out.

Any Real Change Implies The Breakup Of The World As One Has Always Known It, The Loss Of All That Gave One An Identity, The End Of Safety.

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.

The Purpose Of Art Is To Lay Bare The Questions That Have Been Hidden By The Answers.

I Think That The Inability To Love Is The Central Problem, Because That Inability Masks A Certain Terror, And That Terror Is The Terror Of Being Touched. And If You Can't Be Touched, You Can't Be Changed. And If You Can't Be Changed, You Can't Be Alive.

Inability To Love

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.

The Poet Or The Revolutionary Is There To Articulate The Necessity, But Until The People Themselves Apprehend It, Nothing Can Happen ... Perhaps It Can't Be Done Without The Poet, But It Certainly Can't Be Done Without The People. The Poet And The People Get On Generally Very Badly, And Yet They Need Each Other. The Poet Knows It Sooner Than The People Do. The People Usually Know It After The Poet Is Dead; But That's All Right. The Point Is To Get Your Work Done, And Your Work Is To Change The World.

There Are So Many Ways Of Being Despicable It Quite Makes One’s Head Spin. But The Way To Be Really Despicable Is To Be Contemptuous Of Other People’s Pain.

Rage Cannot Be Hidden, It Can Only Be Dissembled. This Dissembling Deludes The Thoughtless, And Strengthens Rage And Adds, To Rage, Contempt.

You Don’t Have A Home Until You Leave It And Then, When You Have Left It, You Never Can Go Back.

We Have All Had The Experience Of Finding That Our Reactions And Perhaps Even Our Deeds Have Denied Beliefs We Thought Were Ours.

A Ghetto Can Be Improved In One Way Only: Out Of Existence.

I Am What Time, Circumstance, History, Have Made Of Me, Certainly, But I Am Also, Much More Than That. So Are We All.

African American

The Writer's Only Real Task: To Recreate Out Of The Disorder Of Life That Order Which Is Art

Each Of Us, Helplessly And Forever, Contains The Other - Male In Female, Female In Male, White In Black, And Black In White. We Are Part Of Each Other. Many Of My Countrymen Appear To Find This Fact Exceedingly Inconvenient And Even Unfair, And So, Very Often, Do I. But None Of Us Can Do Anything About It.

The Past Is What Makes The Present Coherent, And The Past Will Remain Horrible For Exactly As Long As We Refuse To Assess It Honestly.

People Pay For What They Do, And Still More For What They Have Allowed Themselves To Become, And They Pay For It, Very Simply, By The Lives They Lead.

It Is A Terrible, An Inexorable, Law That One Cannot Deny The Humanity Of Another Without Diminishing One's Own: In The Face Of One's Victim, One Sees Oneself.

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.

And Love Will Simply Have No Choice But To Go Into Battle With Space And Time, And Furthermore, To Win.

Great Art Can Only Be Created Out Of Love.

Allegiance, After All, Has To Work Two Ways; And One Can Grow Weary Of An Allegiance Which Is Not Reciprocal.

She Was Twenty And Had Come To Realize That, Though She Had A Voice, She Wasn't A Singer; That To Endure And Embrace The Life Of A Singer Demands A Whole Lot More Than A Voice.

You Know, It's Not The World That Was My Oppressor, Because What The World Does To You, If The World Does It To You Long Enough And Effectively Enough, You Begin To Do To Yourself.

Fonny And I Just Sat There... While The Voices Of The Congregation Rose And Rose Around Us, Without Mercy... Teddy Had The Tambourine, And Gave The Cue To The Piano Player-i Never Got To Know Him: A Long Dark, Evil-looking Brother, With Hands Made For Strangling; And With These Hands He Attacked The Keyboard Like He Was Beating The Brains Out Of Someone He Remembered. No Doubt The Congregation Had Their Memories, Too, And They Went To Pieces. The Church Began To Rock.

Talent Is Insignificant. I Know A Lot Of Talented Ruins. Beyond Talent Lie All The Usual Words: Discipline, Love, Luck, But, Most Of All, Endurance.

I Can't Believe What You Say, Because I See What You Do.

To Defend Oneself Against A Fear Is Simply To Insure That One Will, One Day, Be Conquered By It; Fears Must Be Faced.

In The Invincible And Indescribable Squalor Of Harlem ... I Was Tormented. I Felt Caged, Like An Animal. I Wanted To Escape. I Felt If I Did Not Get Out I Would Slowly Strangle.

Everything In Life Depends On How That Life Accepts Its Limits.

To Act Is To Be Committed, And To Be Committed Is To Be In Danger.

All I Know About Music Is That Not Many People Ever Really Hear It. And Even Then, On The Rare Occasions When Something Opens Within, And The Music Enters, What We Mainly Hear, Or Hear Corroborated, Are Personal, Private, Vanishing Evocations. But The Man Who Creates The Music Is Hearing Something Else, Is Dealing With The Roar Rising From The Void And Imposing Order On It As It Hits The Air. What Is Evoked In Him, Then, Is Of Another Order, More Terrible Because It Has No Words, And Triumphant, Too, For That Same Reason. And His Triumph, When He Triumphs, Is Ours.

Whatever You Describe To Another Person Is Also A Revelation Of Who You Are And Who You Think You Are. You Can Not Describe Anything Without Betraying Your Point Of View, Your Aspirations, Your Fears, Your Hopes. Everything.

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.

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.

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.

In Order To Have A Conversation With Someone You Must Reveal Yourself.

The Power Of The White World Is Threatened Whenever A Black Man Refuses To Accept The White World's Definitions.

I Want To Be An Honest Man And A Good Writer.

Negro Servants Have Been Smuggling Odds And Ends Out Of White Homes For Generations, And White People Have Been Delighted To Have Them Do It, Because It Has Assuaged A Dim Guilt And Testified To The Intrinsic Superiority Of White People.

The Making Of An American Begins At The Point Where He Himself Rejects All Other Ties, Any Other History, And Himself Adopts The Vesture Of His Adopted Land.

If I Could Make You Stay, I Would,’ He Shouted. ‘if I Had To Beat You, Chain You, Starve You—if I Could Make You Stay, I Would.’ He Turned Back Into The Room; The Wind Blew His Hair. He Shook His Finger At Me, Grotesquely Playful. ‘one Day, Perhaps, You Will Wish I Had.

If The Concept Of God Has Any Validity Or Any Use, It Can Only Be To Make Us Larger, Freer, And More Loving. If God Cannot Do This, Then It Is Time We Got Rid Of Him.

You Have To Go The Way Your Blood Beats. If You Don't Live The Only Life You Have, You Won't Live Some Other Life, You Won't Live Any Life At All.

One Can Only Face In Others What One Can Face In Oneself.

I Thought Of The People Before Me Who Had Looked Down At The River And Gone To Sleep Beneath It. I Wondered About Them. I Wondered How They Had Done It--it, The Physical Act. I Simply Wondered About The Dead Because Their Days Had Ended And I Did Not Know How I Would Get Through Mine.

This Is The Charged, The Dangerous Moment, When Everything Must Be Re-examined, Must Be Made New, When Nothing At All Can Be Taken For Granted.

All Art Is A Kind Of Confession.

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.

There Are People In The World For Whom "coming Along" Is A Perpetual Process, People Who Are Destined Never To Arrive.

The Hope Of The World Lies In What One Demands, Not Of Others, But Of Oneself.

There Is Something Terribly Radical About Believing That One's Own Experience And Images Are Important Enough To Speak About, Much Less To Write About And To Perform

Hatred Destroys The Person Who Hates.

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.

Confusion Is A Luxury Which Only The Very, Very Young Can Possibly Afford And You Are Not That Young Anymore

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.

Someone You Love

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.

Recognizing A Problem Doesn't Always Bring A Solution, But Until We Recognize That Problem, There Can Be No Solution.

A Civilization Is Not Destroyed By Wicked People; It Is Not Necessary That People Be Wicked But Only That They Be Spineless.

Americans, Unhappily, Have The Most Remarkable Ability To Alchemize All Bitter Truths Into An Innocuous But Piquant Confection And To Transform Their Moral Contradictions, Or Public Discussion Of Such Contradictions, Into A Proud Decoration, Such As Are Given For Heroism On The Field Of Battle.

The Face Of A Lover Is An Unknown, Precisely Because It Is Invested With So Much Of Oneself. It Is A Mystery, Containing, Like All Mysteries, The Possibility Of Torment.

Inspirational Love

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.

When The Book Comes Out It May Hurt You - But In Order For Me To Do It, It Had To Hurt Me First. I Can Only Tell You About Yourself As Much As I Can Face About Myself.

We Cannot Discuss The State Of Our Minorities Until We First Have A Sense Of What We Are, Who We Are, What Our Goals Are, And What We Take Life To Be.

The Challenge Is In The Moment; The Time Is Always Now.

Live In The Moment

When You’re Writing, You’re Trying To Find Out Something Which You Don’t Know. The Whole Language Of Writing For Me Is Finding Out What You Don’t Want To Know, What You Don’t Want To Find Out. But Something Forces You To Anyway.

Most People... Find A Disorientating Mismatch Between The Long-term Nature Of Their Liabilities And The Increasingly Short-term Nature Of Their Assets.

To Be With God Is Really To Be Involved In Some Enormous, Overwhelming Desire, And Joy, And Power Which You Cannot Control, Which Controls You.

Overwhelming Desire

To Be A Negro In This Country And To Be Relatively Conscious Is To Be In A Rage Almost All The Time.

African American

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.

It Seems To Me That One Ought To Rejoice In The Fact Of Death-- Ought To Decide, Indeed, To Earn One's Death By Confronting With Passion The Conundrum Of Life. One Is Responsible To Life: It Is The Small Beacon In That Terrifying Darkness From Which We Come And To Which We Shall Return. One Must Negotiate This Passage As Nobly As Possible, For The Sake Of Those Who Are Coming After Us.

Whoever Is Born In New York Is Ill-equipped To Deal With Any Other City: All Other Cities Seem, At Best, A Mistake, And, At Worst, A Fraud. No Other City Is So Spitefully Incoherent.

The Interior Life Is A Real Life, And The Intangible Dreams Of People Have A Tangible Effect On The World.

The Moral Authority In The Western World Is Gone. And It Is Gone Forever. It Is Gone, Not Because Of The Criminal Record--everybody's Record Is Criminal. It Is Gone Because You Cannot Do One Thing And Pretend You're Doing Another! None Of Us, Who Are Sitting Around In Some Of The True Limbo Out-of-space, Which We Call "now," Waiting To Be Saved, Civilized, Or Discovered, Have The Moral Authority To Say Anything.

There Is A Fearful Splendor In Absolute Desolation.

The Wretched Of The Earth Do Not Decide To Become Extinct, They Resolve, On The Contrary, To Multiply: Life Is Their Weapon Against Life, Life Is All That They Have.

If You're Afraid To Die, You Will Not Be Able To Live.

People Are Too Various To Be Treated So Lightly. I Am Too Various To Be Trusted.

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.

Anyone Who Has Ever Struggled With Poverty Knows How Extremely Expensive It Is To Be Poor.

You Took The Best, So Why Not Take The Rest?

But The Relationship Of Morality And Power Is A Very Subtle One. Because Ultimately Power Without Morality Is No Longer Power.

The American Idea Of Racial Progress Is Measured By How Fast I Become White.

I Met A Lot Of People In Europe. I Even Encountered Myself.

True Rebels After All, Are As Rare As True Lovers,and In Both Cases, To Mistake A Fever For Passion Can Destroy One's Life

Yr Crown Has Been Bought And Paid For. All You Have To Do Is Put It On Yr Head

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.

If All You Want To Do Is Make Money, The Very Last Thing You Need Is Imagination.

To Be Black And Conscious In America Is To Be In A Constant State Of Rage.

There Is Never Time In The Future In Which We Will Work Out Our Salvation. The Challenge Is In The Moment; The Time Is Always Now.

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.

The Noblest Spirit Is Most Strongly Attracted By The Love Of Glory.

Love Takes Off Masks That We Fear We Cannot Live Without And Know We Cannot Live Within.

An Identity Is Questioned Only When It Is Menaced, As When The Mighty Begin To Fall, Or When The Wretched Begin To Rise, Or When The Stranger Enters The Gates, Never, Thereafter, To Be A Stranger.

A Writer Has To Take All The Risks Of Putting Down What He Sees. No One Can Tell Him About That. No One Can Control That Reality. It Reminds Me Of Something Pablo Picasso Was Supposed To Have Said To Gertrude Stein While He Was Painting Her Portrait. Gertrude Said, “i Don’t Look Like That.” And Picasso Replied, “you Will.” And He Was Right.

The Purpose Of Education...is To Create In A Person The Ability To Look At The World For Himself, To Make His Own Decisions.

You Write In Order To Change The World, Knowing Perfectly Well That You Probably Can't, But Also Knowing That Literature Is Indispensable To The World... The World Changes According To The Way People See It, And If You Alter, Even By A Millimeter, The Way... People Look At Reality, Then You Can Change It.

The Impossible Is The Least That One Can Demand.

People Who Shut Their Eyes To Reality Simply Invite Their Own Destruction.

There Is No Reason For You To Try To Become Like White People And There Is No Basis Whatever For Their Impertinent Assumption That *they* Must Accept *you*. The Really Terrible Thing, Old Buddy, Is That You Must Accept Them. And I Mean That Very Seriously. You Must Accept Them And Accept Them With Love.

If The Relationship Of Father To Son Could Really Be Reduced To Biology, The Whole Earth Would Blaze With The Glory Of Fathers And Sons.

The Betrayal Of A Belief Is Not The Same Thing As Ceasing To Believe. If This Were Not So There Would Be No Moral Standards In The World At All.

These Boys, Now, Were Living As We'd Been Living Then, They Were Growing Up With A Rush And Their Heads Bumped Abruptly Against The Low Ceiling Of Their Actual Possibilities. They Were Filled With Rage. All They Really Knew Were Two Darknesses, The Darkness Of Their Lives, Which Were Now Closing In On Them, And The Darkness Of The Movies, Which Had Blinded Them To That Other Darkness, And In Which They Now, Vindictively, Dreamed, At Once More Together Than They Were At Any Other Time, And More Alone.

When Human Rights Are Abused On A Grand Scale, The Broth Of Purity Boils And Feeds The Rebellion Of A New Order.

Drive To The Heart Of Every Answer And Expose The Question The Answer Hides.

The Future Is Like Heaven-everyone Exalts It But No One Wants To Go There Now.

You Think Your Pains And Heartbreaks Are Unprecedented In The History Of The World, But Then You Read. [and Then You Discover That Others Have Suffered Much More Than You And Your Problems Look Good In Comparison]

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.

The Primary Distinction Of The Artist Is That He Must Actively Cultivate That State Which Most Men, Necessarily, Must Avoid: The State Of Being Alone.

You Have To Decide Who You Are And Force The World To Deal With You, Not With Its Idea Of You.

It Is Dangerous To Be An American Negro Male. America Has Never Wanted Its Negroes To Be Men, And Does Not, Generally, Treat Them As Men. It Treats Them As Mascots, Pets, Or Things.

Know From Whence You Came. If You Know Whence You Came, There Are Absolutely No Limitations To Where You Can Go.

If I Am Not What You Say I Am, Then You Are Not Who You Think You Are.

I Prefer Sinners And Madmen, Who Can Learn, Who Can Change, Who Can Teach-or People Like Myself, If I May Say So, Who Are Not Afraid To Eat A Lobster Alone As They Take On Their Shoulders The Monumental Weight Of Thirty Years

Experience, Which Destroys Innocence, Also Leads One Back To It.

When A Man Asks Himself What Is Meant By Action He Proves That He Isn't A Man Of Action. Action Is A Lack Of Balance. In Order To Act You Must Be Somewhat Insane. A Reasonably Sensible Man Is Satisfied With Thinking.

Voyagers Discover That The World Can Never Be Larger Than The Person That Is In The World; But It Is Impossible To Foresee This, It Is Impossible To Be Warned.

You Want To Write A Sentence As Clean As A Bone. That Is The Goal.

I Think Americans Are Terrified Of Feeling Anything. I Never Met A People More Infantile In My Life.

No One Can Possibly Know What Is About To Happen: It Is Happening, Each Time, For The First Time, For The Only Time.

People Who Have Been Wronged Will Attempt To Right The Wrong; They Would Not Be People If They Didn't. They Can Rarely Afford To Be Scrupulous About The Means They Will Use. They Will Use Such Means As Come To Hand. Neither, In The Main, Will They Distinguish One Oppressor From Another, Nor See Through To The Root Principle Of Their Oppression.

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.

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.

All I Know About Music Is That Not Many People Ever Really Hear It.

The Occurrence Of An Event Is Not The Same Thing As Knowing What It Is That One Has Lived Through. Most People Had Not Lived -- Nor Could It, For That Matter, Be Said That They Had Died-- Through Any Of Their Terrible Events. They Had Simply Been Stunned By The Hammer. They Passed Their Lives Thereafter In A Kind Of Limbo Of Denied And Unexamined Pain. The Great Question That Faced Him This Morning Was Whether Or Not Had Had Ever, Really, Been Present At His Life.

Terrible Events

Pessimists Are The People Who Have No Hope For Themselves Or For Others. Pessimists Are Also People Who Think The Human Race Is Beneath Their Notice, That They're Better Than Other Human Beings.

Hatred, Which Could Destroy So Much, Never Failed To Destroy The Man Who Hated, And This Was An Immutable Law.

The Most Dangerous Creation Of Any Society Is The Man Who Has Nothing To Lose.

Not Only Was I Not Born To Be A Slave; I Was Not Born To Hope To Become The Equal Of The Slave Master.

Sentimentality, The Ostentatious Parading Of Excessive And Spurious Emotion, Is The Mark Of Dishonesty, The Inability To Feel.

You Don't Need Numbers; You Need Passion, And This Is Proven By The History Of The World!

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.

Writing Is A Political Instrument.

A Child Cannot Be Taught By Anyone Who Despises Him, And A Child Cannot Afford To Be Fooled.

What Passes For Identity In America Is A Series Of Myths About One's Heroic Ancestors.

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.

Nobody Is More Dangerous Than He Who Imagines Himself Pure In Heart; For His Purity, By Definition, Is Unassailable.

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.

Love Takes Off The Masks That We Fear We Cannot Live Without And Know We Cannot Live Within. I Use The Word "love" Here Not Merely In The Personal Sense But As A State Of Being, Or A State Of Grace - Not In The Infantile American Sense Of Being Made Happy But In The Tough And Universal Sense Of Quest And Daring And Growth.

How Can One Respect, Let Alone Adopt, The Values Of A People Who Do Not, On Any Level Whatever, Live The Way They Say They Do, Or The Way They Say They Should?

A Man's Balance Depends On The Weight He Carries Between His Legs.

I Don't Know, Now, When I First Looked At Hella And Found Her Stale, Found Her Body Uninteresting, Her Presence Grating. It Seemed To Happen All At Once—i Suppose That Only Means That It Had Been Happening For A Long Time.

The Questions Which One Asks Oneself Begin, At Least, To Illuminate The World, And Become One's Key To The Experience Of Others.

Perhaps, As We Say In America, I Wanted To Find Myself. This Is An Interesting Phrase, Not Current As Far As I Know In The Language Of Any Other People, Which Certainly Does Not Mean What It Says But Betrays A Nagging Suspicion That Something Has Been Misplaced. I Think Now That If I Had Any Intimation That The Self I Was Going To Find Would Turn Out To Be Only The Same Self From Which I Had Spent So Much Time In Flight, I Would Have Stayed At Home.

I Started Reading. I Read Everything I Could Get My Hands On...by The Time I Was Thirteen I Had Read Myself Out Of Harlem. I Had Read Every Book In Two Libraries And Had A Card For The Forty-second Street Branch.

Those Kids Aren't Dumb. But The People Who Run These Schools Want To Make Sure They Don't Get Smart: They Are Really Teaching The Kids To Be Slaves.

People Are Trapped In History And History Is Trapped In Them.

The White Man Discovered The Cross By Way Of The Bible, But The Black Man Discovered The Bible By Way Of The Cross.

When Americans Look Out On The World, They See Nothing But Dark And Menacing Strangers Who Appear To Have No Sense Of Rhythm At All, Nor Any Respect Or Affection For White People; And White Americans Really Do Not Know What To Make Of All This, Except To Increase The Defense Budget.

Remember, To Hate, To Be Violent, Is Demeaning. It Means You're Afraid Of The Other Side Of The Coin -- To Love And Be Loved.

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.

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.

Education Is Indoctrination If You're White - Subjugation If You're Black.

Whatever White People Do Not Know About Negroes Reveals, Precisely And Inexorably, What They Do Not Know About Themselves.

To Ask Questions Of The Universe, And Then Learn To Live With Those Questions, Is The Way He Achieves His Own Identity.

I've Always Believed That You Can Think Positive Just As Well As You Can Think Negative.

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