{"author":"James Baldwin","author_id":"James+Baldwin","total_quotes":179,"quotes":[{"text":"We had our arms round each other. It was like holding in my hand some rare, exhausted, nearly doomed bird which I had miraculously happened to find.","author":"James Baldwin","tags":["gay"],"id":87,"author_id":"James+Baldwin"},{"text":"Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.","author":"James Baldwin","tags":["parenting","role-models"],"id":4647,"author_id":"James+Baldwin"},{"text":"You know and I know that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too early. We cannot be free until they are free.","author":"James Baldwin","tags":["oppression","race"],"id":5533,"author_id":"James+Baldwin"},{"text":"Ain't no such thing as a little fault or a big fault. Satan get his foot in the door, he ain't going to rest till he's in the room. You is in the Word or you ain't--ain't no halfway with God.","author":"James Baldwin","tags":["inspirational","religion-christianity","spirituality"],"id":6812,"author_id":"James+Baldwin"},{"text":"The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed the collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace, that Americans have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors, that American men are the world's most direct and virile, that American women are pure. Negroes know far more about white Americans than that; it can almost be said, in fact, that they know about white Americans what parents—or, anyway, mothers—know about their children, and that they very often regard white Americans that way. And perhaps this attitude, held in spite of what they know and have endured, helps to explain why Negroes, on the whole, and until lately, have allowed themselves to feel so little hatred. The tendency has really been, insofar as this was possible, to dismiss white people as the slightly mad victims of their own brainwashing.","author":"James Baldwin","tags":["america","myths"],"id":7665,"author_id":"James+Baldwin"},{"text":"Whose little boy are you?","author":"James Baldwin","tags":["african-american","black","church","coming-of-age","epiphany","god","harlem","institution","james-baldwin","racism","religion","renaissance","youth"],"id":8823,"author_id":"James+Baldwin"},{"text":"Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always be seen as untimely. This is because a real writer is always shifting and changing and searching. The world has many labels for him, of which the most treacherous is the label of 'Success.","author":"James Baldwin","tags":["old-age","success","untimely-death","writers"],"id":13402,"author_id":"James+Baldwin"},{"text":"I can't be a pessimist because I'm alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter.","author":"James Baldwin","tags":["academia","optimism","pessimism"],"id":13823,"author_id":"James+Baldwin"},{"text":"In any event, the sloppy and fatuous nature of American good will can never be relied upon to deal with hard problems. These have been dealt with, when they have been dealt with at all, out of necessity—and in political terms, anyway, necessity means concessions made in order to stay on top.","author":"James Baldwin","tags":["americans","avoidance","difficulties","good-will","problems"],"id":14819,"author_id":"James+Baldwin"},{"text":"Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.","author":"James Baldwin","tags":["death","delusion"],"id":15283,"author_id":"James+Baldwin"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":179,"pages":18,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}