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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.

-James A. Baldwin

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People Who Shut Their

James A. Baldwin

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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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More From James A. Baldwin

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

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.

An American Negro, However Deep His Sympathies, Or However Bright His Rage, Ceases To Be Simply A Black Man When He Faces A Black Man From Africa.

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.

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.

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

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

Youth Must Be The Worst Time In Anybody's Life. Everything's Happening For The First Time, Which Means That Sorrow, Then, Lasts Forever. Later, You Can See That There Was Something Very Beautiful In It. That's Because You Ain't Got To Go Through It No More.

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

The Only Thing That White People Have That Black People Need, Or Should Want, Is Power-and No One Holds Power Forever.

Black And White

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.

All Of Africa Will Be Free Before We Can Get A Lousy Cup Of Coffee.

Trust Life, And It Will Teach You, In Joy And Sorrow, All You Need To Know.

Art Has To Be A Kind Of Confession. I Don't Mean A True Confession In The Sense Of That Dreary Magazine. The Effort It Seems To Me, Is: If You Can Examine And Face Your Life, You Can Discover The Terms With Which You Are Connected To Other Lives, And They Can Discover Them, Too - The Terms With Which They Are Connected To Other People.

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

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.

The Responsibility Of A Writer Is To Excavate The Experience Of The People Who Produced Him.

We Take Our Shape, It Is True, Within And Against That Cage Of Reality Bequeathed Us At Our Birth; And Yet It Is Precisely Through Our Dependence On This Reality That We Are Most Endlessly Betrayed.

The World Tends To Trap You In The Role You Play And It Is Always Extremely Hard To Maintain A Watchful, Mocking Distance Between Oneself As One Appears To Be And Oneself As One Actually Is.

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

America Sometimes Resembles, At Least From The Point Of View Of A Black Man, An Exceedingly Monotonous Minstrel Show; The Same Dances, Same Music, Same Jokes. One Has Done (or Been) The Show So Long That One Can Do It In One’s Own Sleep.

Any Honest Examination Of The National Life Proves How Far We Are From The Standard Of Human Freedom With Which We Began. The Recovery Of This Standard Demands Of Everyone Who Loves This Country A Hard Look At Himself, For The Greatest Achievements Must Begin Somewhere, And They Always Begin With The Person.

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

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

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

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.

Christianity Has Operated With An Unmitigated Arrogance And Cruelty - Necessarily, Since A Religion Ordinarily Imposes On Those Who Have Discovered The True Faith The Spiritual Duty Of Liberating The Infidels.

All Over Harlem, Negro Boys And Girls Are Growing Into Stunted Maturity, Trying Desperately To Find A Place To Stand; And The Wonder Is Not That So Many Are Ruined But That So Many Survive.

There Is A 'sanctity' Involved With Bringing A Child Into This World: It Is Better Than Bombing One Out Of It.

For Nothing Is More Unbearable, Once One Has It, Than Freedom.

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]

Money, It Turned Out, Was Exactly Like Sex, You Thought Of Nothing Else If You Didn't Have It And Thought Of Other Things If You Did.

Love Is Like The Lightning, And Your Maturity Is Signaled By The Extent To Which You Can Accept The Dangers And The Power And The Beauty Of Love.

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

People Are Continually Pointing Out To Me The Wretchedness Of White People In Order To Console Me For The Wretchedness Of Blacks. But An Itemized Account Of The American Failure Does Not Console Me And It Should Not Console Anyone Else. That Hundreds Of Thousands Of White People Are Living, In Effect, No Better Than The "niggers" Is Not A Fact To Be Regarded With Complacency. The Social And Moral Bankruptcy Suggested By This Fact Is Of The Bitterest, Most Terrifying Kind.

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.

Any Writer, I Suppose, Feels That The World Into Which He Was Born Is Nothing Less Than A Conspiracy Against The Cultivation Of His Talent.

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

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

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

We Are Very Cruelly Trapped Between What We Would Like To Be And What We Actually Are. And We Cannot Possibly Become What We Would Like To Be Until We Are Willing To Ask Ourselves Just Why The Lives We Lead On This Continent Are Mainly So Empty, So Tame, And So Ugly.

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

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

Hatred Destroys The Person Who Hates.

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

At Four O'clock In The Morning, When Everyone Is Drunk Enough, Then Extraordinary Things Can Happen.

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

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.

There Are Few Things Under Heaven More Unnerving Than The Silent, Accumulating Contempt And Hatred Of A People.

Being In The Pulpit, Was Like Being In The Theatre; I Was Behind The Scenes And Knew How The Illusion Worked.

Behind The Scenes

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.

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

An Identity Would Seem To Be Arrived At By The Way In Which The Person Faces And Uses His Experience.

Every Legend, Moreover, Contains Its Residuum Of Truth, And The Root Function Of Language Is To Control The Universe By Describing It.

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.

Freedom Is Not Something That Anybody Can Be Given. Freedom Is Something People Take, And People Are As Free As They Want To Be

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

Secrets Hidden At The Heart Of Midnight Are Simply Waiting To Be Dragged To The Light, As, On Some Unlucky High Noon, They Always Are. But Secrets Shrouded In The Glare Of Candor Are Bound To Defeat Even The Most Determined And Agile Inspector For The Light Is Always Changing And Proves That The Eye Cannot Be Trusted.

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.

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.

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

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

A Society Must Assume That It Is Stable, But The Artist Must Know, And He Must Let Us Know, That There Is Nothing Stable Under Heaven.

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

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

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.

People Can Cry Much Easier Than They Can Change.

Self Improvement

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.

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.

It Comes As A Great Shock…to Discover That The Flag To Which You Have Pledged Allegiance…has Not Pledged Allegiance To You. It Comes As A Great Shock To See Gary Cooper Killing Off The Indians, And Although You Are Rooting For Gary Cooper, That The Indians Are You.

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

If One Really Wishes To Know How Justice Is Administered In A Country, One Does Not Question The Policemen, The Lawyers, The Judges, Or The Protected Members Of The Middle Class. One Goes To The Unprotected - Those, Precisely, Who Need The Law's Protection Most! - And Listens To Their Testimony.

People Can Cry Much Easier Than They Can Change, A Rule Of Psychology People Like Me Picked Up As Kids On The Street.

History Is Not A Procession Of Illustrious People. It's About What Happens To A People. Millions Of Anonymous People Is What History Is About.

There Are Few Things More Dreadful Than Dealing With A Man Who Knows He Is Going Under, In His Own Eyes, And In The Eyes Of Others. Nothing Can Help That Man. What Is Left Of That Man Flees From What Is Left Of Human Attention.

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

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.

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

No Man Is A Devil In His Own Mind.

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

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

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

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.

I Love America More Than Any Other Country In The World, And, Exactly For This Reason, I Insist On The Right To Criticize Her Perpetually. I Think All Theories Are Suspect, That The Finest Principles May Have To Be Modified, Or May Even Be Pulverized By The Demands Of Life, And That One Must Find, Therefore, One's Own Moral Center And Move Through The World Hoping That This Center Will Guide One Aright.

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.

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

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

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

Unless A Writer Is Extremely Old When He Dies, In Which Case He Has Probably Become A Neglected Institution, His Death Must Always Seem Untimely.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Americans Should Never Come To Europe,' She Said, And Tried To Laugh And Began To Cry, 'it Means They Never Can Be Happy Again. What's The Good Of An American Who Isn't Happy? Happiness Was All We Had.

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.

All Racists Are Irresponsible.

The Real Victim Of Bigotry Is The White Man Who Hides His Weakness Under His Myth Of Superiority.

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.

The Great Force Of History Comes From The Fact That We Carry It Within Us, Are Unconsciously Controlled By It In Many Ways, And History Is Literally Present In All That We Do.

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

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.

Perhaps The Whole Root Of Our Trouble, The Human Trouble, Is That We Will Sacrifice All The Beauty Of Our Lives, Will Imprison Ourselves In Totems, Taboos, Crosses, Blood Sacrifices, Steeples, Mosques, Races, Armies, Flags, Nations, In Order To Deny The Fact Of Death, The Only Fact We Have. 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.

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.

Then I Buckled Up My Shoes, And I Started.

The Male Cannot Bear Very Much Humiliation; And He Really Cannot Bear It, It Obliterates Him.

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.

We Can Make America What America Must Become.

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.

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.

If One Cannot Risk Oneself, Then One Is Simply Incapable Of Giving. And, After All, One Can Give Freedom Only By Setting Someone Free.

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

Do I Really Want To Be Integrated Into A Burning House?

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.

You Think Your Pain And Your Heartbreak Are Unprecedented In The History Of The World, But Then You Read.

But To Look Back From The Stony Plain Along The Road Which Led One To That Place Is Not At All The Same Thing As Walking On The Road; The Perspective To Say The Very Least, Changes Only With The Journey; Only When The Road Has, All Abruptly And Treacherously, And With An Absoluteness That Permits No Argument, Turned Or Dropped Or Risen Is One Able To See All That One Could Not Have Seen From Any Other Place.

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

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.

It Must Be Remembered That In Those Great Days I Was Considered To Be An "integrationist" - This Was Never, Quite, My Own Idea Of Myself - And Malcolm Was Considered To Be A "racist In Reverse." This Formulation, In Terms Of Power - And Power Is The Arena In Which Racism Is Acted Out - Means Absolutely Nothing: It May Even Be Described As A Cowardly Formulation. The Powerless, By Definition, Can Never Be "racists," For They Can Never Make The World Pay For What They Feel Or Fear Except By The Suicidal Endeavor Which Makes Them Fanatics Or Revolutionaries, Or Both.

I Can't Be A Pessimist, Because I Am Alive.

In My Case, I Think My Exile Saved My Life, For It Inexorably Confirmed Something Which Americans Appear To Have Great Difficulty Accepting. Which Is, Simply, This: A Man Is Not A Man Until He Is Able And Willing To Accept His Own Vision Of The World, No Matter How Radically This Vision Departs From Others.

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.

Everybody's Journey Is Individual. If You Fall In Love With A Boy, You Fall In Love With A Boy. The Fact That Many Americans Consider It A Disease Says More About Them Than It Does About Homosexuality.

Falling In Love

To Be Born In A Free Society And Not To Be Born Free Is To Be Born Into A Lie. To Be Told By Co-citizens And Co-christians That You Have No Value, No History, Have Never Done Anything That Is Worthy Of Human Respect Destroys You Because In The Beginning You Believe It.

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.

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

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

The Role Of The Artist Is Exactly The Same As The Role Of The Lover. If I Love You, I Have To Make You Conscious Of The Things You Don’t See.

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.

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.

The States Of Birth, Suffering, Love, And Death, Are Extreme States: Extreme, Universal, And Inescapable. We All Know This, But We Would Rather Not Know It. The Artist Is Present To Correct The Delusions To Which We Are All Prey In Our Attempts To Avoid This Knowledge." - James Baldwin, "the Creative Process

Artists Are Here To Disturb The Peace.

The Question Of Sexual Dominance Can Exist Only In The Nightmare Of That Soul Which Has Armed Itself, Totally, Against The Possibility Of The Changing Motion Of Conquest And Surrender, Which Is Love.

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

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.

The Place In Which I'll Fit Will Not Exist Until I Make It.

You Write In Order To Change The World ... If You Alter, Even By A Millimeter, The Way People Look At Reality, Then You Can Change It.

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

All Art Is A Kind Of Confession.

For, While The Tale Of How We Suffer, And How We Are Delighted, And How We May Triumph Is Never New, It Always Must Be Heard. There Isn't Any Other Tale To Tell, It's The Only Light We've Got In All This Darkness.

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

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.

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.

A Devotion To Humanity Is... Too Easily Equated With A Devotion To A Cause, And Causes, As We Know, Are Notoriously Bloodthirsty.

White People Will Have Quite Enough To Do In Learning How To Accept And Love Themselves And Each Other, And When They Have Achieved This - Which Will Not Be Tomorrow And May Very Well Be Never - The Negro Problem Will No Longer Exist, For It Will No Longer Be Needed.

It Is Certain, In Any Case, That Ignorance, Allied With Power, Is The Most Ferocious Enemy Justice Can Have.

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?

Somebody," Said Jacques, "your Father Or Mine, Should Have Told Us That Not Many People Have Ever Died Of Love. But Multitudes Have Perished, And Are Perishing Every Hour - And In The Oddest Places! - For The Lack Of It.

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.

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

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

James Joyce Is Right About History Being A Nightmare-- But It May Be That Nightmare From Which No One Can Awaken. People Are Trapped In History And History In Trapped In Them.

Everyone Wishes To Be Loved, But In The Event, Nearly No One Can Bear It. Everyone Desires Love But Also Finds It Impossible To Believe That He Deserves It.

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.

Sentimentality, The Ostentatious Parading Of Excessive And Spurious Emotion, Is The Mark Of Dishonesty...the Wet Eyes Of The Sentimentalist Betray His Aversion To Experience, His Fear Of Life, His Arid Heart; And It Is Always, Therefore, The Signal Of Secret And Violent Humanity, The Mark Of Cruelty.

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

A Writer Has To Take All The Risks Of Putting Down What He Sees.

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.

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.

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.

Precisely At The Point When You Begin To Develop A Conscience You Must Find Yourself At War With Your Society.

After My Best Friend Jumped Off The Bridge, I Knew That I Was Next. So-paris. With Forty Dollars And A One-way Ticket.

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.

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.

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

Identity Would Seem To Be The Garment With Which One Covers The Nakedness Of The Self: In Which Case, It Is Best That The Garment Be Loose, A Little Like The Robes Of The Desert, Through Which One's Nakedness Can Always Be Felt, And, Sometimes, Discerned. This Trust In One's Nakedness Is All That Gives One The Power To Change One's Robes.

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

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

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.

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

Freaks Are Called Freaks And Are Treated As They Are Treated – In The Main, Abominably – Because They Are Human Beings Who Cause To Echo, Deep Within Us, Our Most Profound Terrors And Desires.

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

Great Art Can Only Be Created Out Of Love.

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

American History

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.

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.

Ask Any Mexican, Any Puerto Rican, Any Black Man, Any Poor Person - Ask The Wretched How They Fare In The Halls Of Justice, And Then You Will Know, Not Whether Or Not The Country Is Just, But Whether Or Not It Has Any Love For Justice, Or Any Concept Of It. It Is Certain, In Any Case, That Ignorance, Allied With Power, Is The Most Ferocious Enemy Justice Can Have.

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. Whereas Other Cities Flaunt There History - Their Presumed Glory - In Vividly Placed Monuments, Squares, Parks, Plaques, And Boulevards, Such History As New York Has Been Unable Entirely To Obliterate Is To Be Found, Mainly, In The Backwaters Of Wall Street, In The Goat Tracks Of Old And West Broadway, In And Around Washington Square, And, For The Relentless Searcher, In Grimly Inaccessible Regions Of The Bronx.

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.

There Is A Fearful Splendor In Absolute Desolation.

There Are Too Many Things We Do Not Wish To Know About Ourselves. People Are Not, For Example, Terribly Anxious To Be Equal (equal, After All, To What And To Whom?) But They Love The Idea Of Being Superior.

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.

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

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.

I Remember Standing On A Street Corner With The Black Painter Beauford Delaney Down In The Village, Waiting For The Light To Change, And He Pointed Down And Said, 'look.' I Looked And All I Saw Was Water. And He Said, 'look Again,' Which I Did, And I Saw Oil On The Water And The City Reflected In The Puddle. It Was A Great Revelation To Me. I Can't Explain It. He Taught Me How To See, And How To Trust What I Saw. Painters Have Often Taught Writers How To See. And Once You've Had That Experience, You See Differently.

The American Ideal Is, After All, That Everyone Should Be As Much Alike As Possible.

Neither Love Nor Terror Makes One Blind: Indifference Makes One Blind.

Love Does Not Begin And End The Way We Seem To Think It Does. Love Is A Battle, Love Is A War; Love Is A Growing Up.

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

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.

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

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 Appear To Believe That The Country Was Founded By A Band Of Heroes Who Wanted To Be Free. That Happens Not To Be True. What Happened Was That Some People Left Europe Because They Couldn't Stay There Any Longer And Had To Go Somewhere Else To Make It. That's All. They Were Hungry, They Were Poor, They Were Convicts. Those Who Were Making It In England, For Example, Did Not Get On The Mayflower. That's How The Country Was Settled.

There Exists Among The Intolerable Degraded, The Perverse And Powerful Desire To Force Into The Arena Of The Actual Those Fantastic Crimes Of Which They Have Been Accused, Achieving Their Vengeance And Their Own Destruction Through Making The Nightmare Real.

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

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.

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

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.

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