James Baldwin cytaty

strona 5

„Płacz przychodzi ludziom znacznie łatwiej niż zmiana.”

„Świat zamyka nas w pułapce roli, którą gramy, i bardzo trudno jest zachować czujność, zbudować dystans pomiędzy obrazem nas widzianych z zewnątrz i tym, kim jesteśmy w istocie.”

„Ktoś powiedział mi, że życie to młyńskie koło. Obraca się. Sztuka polega na tym, żeby zatykać nos, kiedy się jest pod wodą, i nie dostać zawrotu głowy, kiedy jest się na górze.”

“Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.”

“To accept one's past - one's history - is not the same things as drowning in it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.”

“There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.”

“Artists are here to disturb the peace.”

“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.”

“Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.”

“I want to be an honest man and a good writer.”

“The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.”

“There are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Whose little boy are you?”

“I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am, also, much more than that. So are we all.”

“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.”

“Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

“You took the best, so why not take the rest?”

“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.”

“Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did.”

“You don't realize that you're intelligent until it gets you into trouble.”

“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.”

“When one begins looking for influences one finds them by the score. I haven't thought much about my own, not enough anyway; I hazard that the King James Bible, the rhetoric of the store-front church, something ironic and violent and perpetually understated in Negro speech — and something of Dickens' love for bravura — have something to do with me today; but I wouldn't stake my life on it. Likewise, innumerable people have helped me in many ways; but finally, I suppose, the most difficult (and most rewarding) thing in my life has been the fact that I was born a Negro and was forced, therefore, to effect some kind of truce with this reality.”

“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.”

“Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one’s beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses.”

“I have not written about being a Negro at such length because I do not expect that to be my only subject, but only because it was the gate I had to unlock before I could hope to write about anything else.”

“Now, leaving aside all the physical factors one can quote — leaving aside the rape or murder, leaving aside the bloody catalogue of oppression which we are too familiar with any way — what the system does to the subjugated is to destroy his sense of reality. It destroys his father's authority over him. His father can no longer tell him anything because his past has disappeared.”