The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side. James A.Baldwin
American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it. James A.Baldwin
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 A.Baldwin
The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in. James A.Baldwin
The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others. James A.Baldwin
No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it. James A.Baldwin
Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch. James A.Baldwin
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. James A.Baldwin
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. James A.Baldwin
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 A.Baldwin
Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable. James A.Baldwin
To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the making of bread. James A.Baldwin
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. James A.Baldwin