Frasi di James Arthur Baldwin

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“Ciò che la fortuna dà non è un regalo, ma solo un prestito.”

“Il paradosso dell'educazione è precisamente questo: che mentre uno inizia a diventare consapevole, inizia a esaminare la società nella quale viene educato.”

“È un brutto colpo scoprire, all'età di cinque o sei anni, che in un mondo di Gary Cooper tu sei l'indiano.”

“Il futuro è come il paradiso – tutti lo esaltano ma nessuno ci vuole andare adesso.”

“La libertà non è una cosa che si possa dare; la libertà, uno se la prende, e ciascuno è libero quanto vuole esserlo.”

“Ritengo che il senso nero di maschile e femminile sia molto più sofisticato della concezione occidentale.”

“Il posto in cui mi troverò bene non esisterà finché non lo creerò.”

“Immagino che una delle ragioni per cui le persone si aggrappano al loro odio così ostinatamente è perché sentono che, una volta che l'odio sarà passato, saranno costrette a fronteggiare il dolore.”

“Everybody's journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.”

“The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat.”

“You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.”

“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.”

“It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.”

“Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity”

“People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state on innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.”

“For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness.”

“It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.”

“Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore”

“You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don't live the only life you have, you won't live some other life, you won't live any life at all.”

“Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.”

“Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.”

“Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.”

“The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains.”

“Nakedness has no color: this can come as news only to those who have never covered, or been covered by, another naked human being.”

“Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.”

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

“If you're treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they're real for you whether they're real or not.”

“People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception.”

“No man is a devil in his own mind.”

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who 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 ever had been alive.”

“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.”

“If you cannot love me, I will die. Before you came I wanted to die, I have told you many times. It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody.”

“I often wonder what I'd do if there weren't any books in the world.”

“People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.”

“Somebody," said Jacques, "your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour - and in the oddest places! - for the lack of it.”

“how can one respect, let alone adopt, the values of a people who do not, on any level whatever, live the way they say they do, or the way they say they should?”

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