I know I haven't been posting as much, lately. I am still writing--most of it just hasn't made it into cyber space yet. I am hoping soon to do some editing, finish some drafts and post a bit more over the next months. For today, I wanted to celebrate the life of James Baldwin. These are a few of his quotes that, in particular, reach out to me:
"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 Baldwin~
"Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling
in the dark. Nobody knows what is going to happen to him from one
moment to the next, or how one will bear it. This is irreducible. And it's true of everybody. Now,
it is true that the nature of society is to create, among its citizens,
an illusion of safety; but it is also absolutely true that the safety
is always necessarily an illusion. Artists are here to disturb the
peace." ~James Baldwin~
"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." ~James Baldwin~
"Ask the wretched how they fare in the halls of justice, and then you will know, not whether or not the country is just, but whether or not it has any love for justice, or any concept of it." ~James Baldwin~
"All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists,
if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to
vomit the anguish up." ~James Baldwin~
"Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor." ~James Baldwin~
"Art has to be a kind of confession. I don't mean a true
confession in the sense of that dreary magazine. The effort it seems to
me, is: if you can examine and face your life, you can discover the
terms with which you are connected to other lives, and they can discover
them, too--the terms with which they are connected to other people." ~James Baldwin~
"It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have." ~James Baldwin~
