James Baldwin

Quotes

• “Sometimes, when he was not near me, I thought, I will never let him 'Touch' me again. Then, when he 'Touched' me, I thou...”
• “What the times demand, and in an unprecedented fashion, is that one be--not seem--outrageous, independent, anarchical. T...”
• “The only thing white people have that black people need, or should want, is power--and no one holds power forever. White...”
• “I told myself all sorts of lies, standing there at the bar, but I could not move. And this was partly because I knew tha...”
• “Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultiva...”
• “Then the door is before him. There is darkness all around him, there is silence in him. Then the door opens and he stand...”
• “The universe, which is not merely the stars and the moon and the planets, flowers, grass and trees, but other people, ha...”
• “The Constitution gives you the right, as a white man, to have a rifle in your home. The Constitution gives you the right...”
• “Ultimately, the artist and the revolutionary function as they function, and pay whatever dues they must pay behind it be...”
• “Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death m...”
• “Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will im...”
• “There appears to be a vast amount of confusion on this point, but I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be "accept...”
• “In any event, the sloppy and fatuous nature of American good will can never be relied upon to deal with hard problems. T...”
• “The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about ...”
• “Tell me, he said, "What is this thing about time? Why is it better to be late than early? People are always saying, we m...”
• “No one knows very much about the life of another. This ignorance becomes vivid, if you love another. Love sets the imagi...”
• “If I could make you stay, I would,’ he shouted. ‘If I had to beat you, chain you, starve you—if I could make you stay, I...”
• “I am very much concerned that American Negroes achieve their freedom here in the United States. But I am also concerned ...”
• “You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a wor...”
• “Every writer has only one story to tell, and he has to find a way of telling it until the meaning becomes clearer and cl...”
• “A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled. A child cannot be taught by...”
• “I guess it can’t be too often that two people can laugh and make love, too, make love because they are laughing, laugh b...”
• “Whereas Jesus and his disciples were distrusted by the state largely because they respected the poor and shared everythi...”
• “Literature is indispensable to the world. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even b...”
• “They knew that no one heard, that bloodless people cannot be made to bleed. So they blew what everyone had heard before,...”
• “He wanted to go home and lock his door and sleep. He was tired of the troubles of real people. He wanted to get back to ...”
• “There are women who have forgotten that to be a woman doesn't simply mean humiliation, doesn't simply mean bitterness. I...”
• “It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of p...”
• “Elisha,' he said, 'no matter what happens to me, where I go, what folks say about me, no matter what anybody says, you r...”
• “It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to wa...”
• “This was not as real as my despairing sense that nothing was real for me, nothing would ever be real for me again – unle...”
• “If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cann...”
• “That was how I met her, in a bar in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, she was drinking and watching, and that was why I liked her,...”
• “I know that people can be better than they are. We are capable of bearing a great burden, once we discover that the burd...”
• “All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell...”
• “Other people cannot see what I see whenever I look into your father's face, for behind your father's face as it is today...”
• “There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be ...”
• “He wanted me to come home--to come home, as he said, and settle down, and whenever he said that I thought of the sedimen...”
• “I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they wi...”
• “People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very si...”
• “We had our arms round each other. It was like holding in my hand some rare, exhausted, nearly doomed bird which I had mi...”
• “The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then...”
• “She fitted in my arms, she always had, and the shock of holding her caused me to feel that my arms had been empty since ...”
• “I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize...”
• “There is never a time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment, the time is...”
• “We cannot escape our origins, however hard we try, those origins which contain the key -could we but find it- to all we ...”
• “Nakedness has no color: this can come as news only to those who have never covered, or been covered by, another naked hu...”
• “The question of identity is a question involving the most profound panic—a terror as primary as the nightmare of the mor...”
• “Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they wan...”
• “A civilization is not destroyed by wicked people it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spinele...”