James A. Baldwin Quotes About Revelations
-
In overlooking, denying, evading this complexity--which is nothing more than the disquieting complexity of ourselves--we are diminished and we perish; only within this web of ambiguity, paradox, this hunger, danger, darkness, can we find at once ourselves and the power that will free us from ourselves. It is this power of revelation that is the business of the novelist, this journey toward a more vast reality which must take precedence over other claims.
→ -
Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover's war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, to make freedom real.
→ -
I remember standing on a street corner with the black painter Beauford Delaney down in the Village, waiting for the light to change, and he pointed down and said, 'Look.' I looked and all I saw was water. And he said, 'Look again,' which I did, and I saw oil on the water and the city reflected in the puddle. It was a great revelation to me. I can't explain it. He taught me how to see, and how to trust what I saw. Painters have often taught writers how to see. And once you've had that experience, you see differently.
→ -
Whatever you describe to another person is also a revelation of who you are and who you think you are. You can not describe anything without betraying your point of view, your aspirations, your fears, your hopes. Everything.
→
Related Authors
-
Gwendolyn Brooks Poet -
Richard Wright Author -
Toni Morrison Novelist -
Nikki Giovanni Writer -
Amiri Baraka Writer -
Margaret Mead Cultural Anthropologist -
Malcolm X Human rights activist -
Eldridge Cleaver Writer -
Martin Luther King, Jr. Civil rights activist -
Lorraine Hansberry Playwright -
Flannery O'Connor Writer -
Langston Hughes Poet -
Maya Angelou Author -
Ta-Nehisi Coates Writer -
Alice Walker Author -
Nina Simone Singer -
Henry James Writer -
Ralph Ellison Novelist -
W. E. B. Du Bois Historian -
Zora Neale Hurston Anthropologist