Quotes About Awareness

White children, in the main, and whether they are rich or poor, grow up with a grasp of reality so feeble that they can very accurately be described as deluded. White people have managed to get through entire lifetimes in this euphoric state, but black people have not been so lucky: a black man who sees the world the way John Wayne, for example, sees it would not be an eccentric patriot, but a raving maniac.

this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it.

One had to make one's way carefully here, for all these people were blind.

Neither love nor terror makes one blind; indifference makes one blind.

Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise. If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.

something opened in my brain, a secret, noiseless door swung open, frightening me

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

We moved in a silence which was music from everywhere.

I think it's better to know that you don't know, that way you can grow with the mystery as the mystery grows in you. But, these days, of course, everybody knows everything, that's why so many people are so lost.

Americans suffer from an ignorance that is not only colossal, but sacred.

When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.

The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don't see." ? James Baldwin

I'm aware, you know, that I and the people I love may perish in the morning. I know that. But there's light on our faces now.

Not everything that is face can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

Not everything that is faced can be changed but nothing can be changed unless it is faced.

TROUPE: Do you have any feelings about yuppies? BALDWIN: I saw them coming. I knew them. They can't, I'm afraid, be taught anything.

Just as the birds above our heads circling are singing, knowing that, in what lies before them, the always unknown passage, wind, water, air, the failing light the failing night the blinding sun they must get the journey done. Listen. They have wings and voices are making choices are using what they have. They are aware that, on long journeys, each bears the other, whirring, stirring love occuring in the middle of the terrifying air.

You accept life as it is, you see it as it is before you can change it.

The American sense of reality is dictated by what Americans are trying to avoid; and if you're trying to avoid reality, how can you face it?

An artist's) role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are.

If you're an artist, you're guilty of a crime: not that you're aware, which is bad enough, but that you see things other people don't admit are there.

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious, is to be in a rage almost all the time. So that the first problem is how to control that rage so that it won't destroy you. Part of the rage is this: it isn't only what is happening to you, but it's what's happening all around you all of the time, in the face of the most extraordinary and criminal indifference, the indifference and ignorance of the most white people in this country.

The paradox of education is precisely this—that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. --"The Negro Child—His Self-Image," in Saturday Review (New York, 21 Dec. 1963; repr. in The Price of the Ticket as "A Talk to Teachers," 1985)     Europe

a child's major attention has to be concentrated on how to fit into a world which, with every passing hour, reveals itself as merciless.