People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned. An invented past can never be used it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.
#Memorable quotes of another country by james baldwin how to#
To accept one’s past-one’s history-is not the same thing as drowning in it it is learning how to use it. You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say ‘Yes’ to life.Ī liberal: someone who thinks he knows more about your experience than you do.Īll I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. People can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, any more than they can invent their parents. Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind. People can cry much easier than they can change. Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced. Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. Nakedness has no color: this can come as news only to those who have never covered, or been covered by, another naked human being. The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.Īnyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.Ĭhildren have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them. Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law. You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. If certain things are described to you as being real they’re real for you whether they’re real or not. If you’re treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. And they pay for it very simply by the lives they lead.
People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain. I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.
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