Poems List
A ghetto can be improved in one way only: out of existence.
People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.
Our dehumanization of the Negro then is indivisible from our dehumanization of ourselves; the loss of our own identity is the price we pay for our annulment of his.
It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.
An American Negro, however deep his sympathies, or however bright his rage, ceases to be simply a black man when he faces a black man from Africa.
John did not remember very clearly the first time she had gone, to have Roy; folks said that he had cried and carried on the whole time his mother was away; he remembered only enough to be afraid every time her belly began to swell, knowing that each time the swelling began it would not end until she was taken from him, to come back with a stranger.
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.
The making of an American begins at that point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land.
No one can possibly know what is about to happen it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.
Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy.
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Nascido em Harlem, Nova Iorque, Baldwin emergiu como uma voz literária crucial no meio do século XX. Seus escritos, incluindo "Go Tell It on the Mountain", "Notes of a Native Son" e "The Fire Next Time", são aclamados por sua profundidade psicológica e análise social incisiva. Ele abordou corajosamente as injustiças raciais e sociais, tornando-se um ícone para o Movimento pelos Direitos Civis. Baldwin viveu grande parte de sua vida adulta na França, onde continuou a produzir obras influentes até sua morte.