James Baldwin citations

Page 4

“Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?”

“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.”

“Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.”

“The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.”

“When you're writing you're trying to find out something which you don't know.”

“The impossible is the least that one can demand.”

“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.”

“It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.”

“Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.”

“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.”

“American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.”

“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 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”

“The subtle and deadly change of heart that might occur in you would be involved with the realization that a civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.”

“To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to bein all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.”

“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.”

“For nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.”

“Allegiance, after all, has to work two ways; and one can grow weary of an allegiance which is not reciprocal.”

“If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.”

“With everything in me screaming No! yet the sum of me sighed Yes.”

“Yr crown has been bought and paid for. All you have to do is put it on yr head”

“There are people in the world for whom "coming along" is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.”

“People who cling to their illusions find it difficult, if not impossible, to learn anything worth learning: a people under the necessity of creating themselves must examine everything, and soak up learning the way the roots of a tree soak up water.”

“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”

“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.”

“People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.”

“For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for whatthey become.”

“The American ideal is, after all, that everyone should be as much alike as possible.”

“There is a fearful splendor in absolute desolation.”