“He was silent for a long while. Then: 'You do, sometimes, remind me of the kind of man who is tempted to put himself in prison in order to avoid being hit by a car.'”
Pt. 2, Ch. 3 - p.104
Giovanni's Room (1956)
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James Baldwin 163
(1924-1987) writer from the United States 1924–1987Related quotes

Interview with the Chicago Times, Feb. 14, 1881.

Three Discourses at Friday Communion November 14, 1849 Hong translation 1997 P. 119-120
1840s, Three Discourses at the Communion on Fridays (1849)

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XXI Letters. Personal Records. Dated Notes.

“Sometimes, Lev, I just want to smack you."
"You already hit him with a car.”
Source: UnSouled

“Sometimes you best avoid talking by being quiet, but sometimes you best avoid talking by talking.”
Source: We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

Beautiful Losers (1966)
Context: What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is the caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love.

Tjalling Koopmans in: Review of economics and statistics, Vol. 31 -(1949), p. 87