James Baldwin

"Perspective is everything when you are experiencing pain."

"Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity."

"To accept one's past, one must be humble enough to realize that the past cannot be changed."

"Confront the now in all its complexity, beauty, and terror."

"This is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again."

"You cannot fix what you will not face."

"The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls."

"The artistic struggle is a struggle against silence, a struggle to articulate experience."

"I use the word 'love' not in the sentimental American sense, but in the sense of man's commitment to man."

"The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side."

"The most crucial time in any person's development is infancy."

"It is a fearful thing to love what death can touch."

"The failure of the American educational system to teach people to think is monstrous."

"One's past is really nothing at all compared to one's present relationship with oneself."

"The truth is that there is always something you can do. You are not helpless."

"People who imagine that history flatters them are impudent people."

"The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places."

"I became a writer because writing seemed like the only socially acceptable form of insanity."

"One must surrender one's pride and the very center of one's being to the demands of art."

"Take no one's word for anything, including mine—but trust your experience."

"We cannot live only for ourselves, our lives are connected to others."

"The black experience is the only experience and not the only experience."

"A person does not lightly elect to oppose his society."

"The writer is delegated to discover and reveal the truth about the society in which he lives."

"The only thing white people have that black people need, or should want, is power."

"If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving."

"Fury is the appropriate response to racism, and blacks ought to be far more furious than they are."

"People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them."

"The writer's responsibility is to excavate those depths and to tell us all that he finds."

"A child cannot forget mother and father creeds of the past any more than he can forget his mother."