Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a sense of life’s possibilities. James Baldwin Read Quote
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. James Baldwin Read Quote
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. James Baldwin Read Quote
The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him. James Baldwin Read Quote
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. James Baldwin Read Quote
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. James Baldwin Read Quote
When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living. James Baldwin Read Quote
No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time. James Baldwin Read Quote
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. James Baldwin Read Quote
American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it. James Baldwin Read Quote
