James A. Baldwin Quotes About Giving

Quotes about: Giving

• People can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.

  James A. Baldwin

  People, Giving, Parent

• One writes out of one thing only - one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.

  James A. Baldwin

  Sweet, Art, Real

  "Notes of a Native Son". Book by James A. Baldwin, 1955.

• It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be.

  James A. Baldwin

  Helping Others, Reality, People

  "Letter from a Region in My Mind" by James Baldwin, www.newyorker.com. November 17, 1962.

• Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self: in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert, through which one's nakedness can always be felt, and, sometimes, discerned. This trust in one's nakedness is all that gives one the power to change one's robes.

  James A. Baldwin

  Change, Self, Giving

  "The Devil Finds Work". Book by James A. Baldwin, 1976.

• If one cannot risk oneself, then one is simply incapable of giving. And, after all, one can give freedom only by setting someone free.

  James A. Baldwin

  Giving, Justice, Diversity

  "Letter from a Region in My Mind". www.newyorker.com. November 17, 1962.

• Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.

  James A. Baldwin

  Sweet, Giving, Experience

  "Autobiographical Notes" by James A. Baldwin (1952), republished in James A. Baldwin "Notes of a Native Son" (1955), archive.nytimes.com.

• It is impossible to pretend that you are not heir to, and therefore, however inadequately or unwillingly, responsible to, and for, the time and place that give you life -- without becoming, at very best, a dangerously disoriented human being.

  James A. Baldwin

  Giving, Heirs, Becoming

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