Quotes About Experience

Take no one's word for anything, including mine—but trust your experience. Know whence you came. If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go. The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. 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 and fear.

You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason.

Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford, and you are not that young any more.

But the Negro's experience of the white world cannot possibly create in him any respect for the standards by which the white world claims to live. His own condition is overwhelming proof that white people do not live by these standards.

Someone once said to me that the people in general cannot bear very much reality. He meant by this that they prefer fantasy to a truthful recreation of their experience. People have quite enough reality to bear, by simply getting through their lives, raising their children, dealing with the eternal conundrums of birth, taxes, and death.

To remember it so clearly, so painfully tonight tells me that I have never for an instant truly forgotten it.

You are - how old? Twenty-six or seven? I am nearly twice that and, let me tell you, you are lucky. You are lucky that what is happening to you now is happening now and not when you are forty, or something like that, when there would be no hope for you and you would simply be destroyed.

One cannot argue with anyone's experience or decision or belief. All my evidence would be thrown out of court as irrelevant to the main body of the case, for I could cite only exceptions. The South Side proved the justice of the indictment; the state of the world proved the justice of the indictment. Everything else, stretching back throughout recorded time, was merely a history of those exceptions who had tried to change the world and had failed.

It is, thus, perfectly possible - indeed, it is common - to act on the genuine results of the event, at the same time that the memory manufactures quite another one, an event totally unrelated to the visible and uncontrollable effects in one's life. This may be why we appear to learn absolutely nothing from experience, or may, in other words, account for our incoherence: memory does not require that we reconstitute the event, but that we justify it.

What the times demand, and in an unprecedented fashion, is that one be—not seem—outrageous, independent, anarchical. That one be thoroughly disciplined—as a means of being spontaneous. That one resist at whatever cost the fearful pressures placed on one to lie about one's own experience. For in the same way that the writer scarcely ever had a more uneasy time, he has never been needed more.

No man can say whether you are happy or not until you die, for no man knows misfortunes may overtake you or what misery may be yours in place of all this slendor.

ou think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read

My progress report concerning my journey to the palace of wisdom is discouraging.

One writes out of one thing only — one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from the experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.

You see, whites want black writers to mostly deliver something as if it were an official version of the black experience. But the vocabulary won't hold it, simply. No true account, really, of black life can be held, can be contained in the American vocabulary. As it is, the only way that you can deal with it is by doing great violence to the assumptions on which the vocabulary is based.

It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connect me with all the people that were alive, or who had ever been alive.

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read

As your experience about writing accrues) you learn how little you know. It becomes much more difficult because the hardest thing in the world is simplicity. And the most fearful thing, too. It becomes more difficult because you have to strip yourself of all your disguises, some of which you didn't know you had.

One writes out of one thing only — one's own experience. Everything depends on the 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. - Autobiographical Notes

Her voice reminded me for a minute of what heroin feels like sometimes—when it's in your veins.

Books taught me that the things that tormented me were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive. – James Baldwin, born on this day in 1924

And the education I can receive from an afternoon with Picasso, or from taking one of my nieces or nephews to the movies, is not at all what the state has in mind when it speaks of Education.

We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours. --"The Crusade of Indignation," in Nation (New York, 7 July 1956; repr. in The Price of the Ticket, 1985)     It

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.