James Baldwin Quotes

#1. Every white person in this country-and I do not care what he or she says-knows one thing. They may not know, as they put, "what I want",but they know they would not like to be black here.
If they know that, then they know everything they need to know, and whatever else they say is a lie.

James Baldwin

#2. There are women who have forgotten that to be a woman doesn't simply mean humiliation, doesn't simply mean bitterness. I haven't forgotten it yet ... I'm not going to forget it.

James Baldwin

#3. Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.

James Baldwin

#4. She marched into the street, found a liquor store and bought a bottle; and the weight of the bottle in her straw handbag somehow made everything real; as the purchase of a railroad ticket proves the imminence of a journey.

James Baldwin

#5. You write in order to change the world ... if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.

James Baldwin

#6. Yves did not like showers, he preferred long, scalding baths, with newspapers, cigarettes, and whiskey on a chair next to the bathtub, and with Eric nearby to talk to, to shampoo his hair, and to scrub his back.

James Baldwin

#7. And the reason for this ignorance is that a knowledge of the role these people played - and play - in American life would reveal more about America to Americans than Americans wish to know. The

James Baldwin

#8. He was one of those poets who escaped the terrors of writing by writing all the time.

James Baldwin

#9. I kissed her salty tears and murmured, murmured I don't know what. I felt her body straining, straining to meet mine and I felt my own contracting and drawing away and I knew that I had begun the long fall down.

James Baldwin

#10. Those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.

James Baldwin

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

James Baldwin

#12. No society can smash the social contract and be exempt from the consequences, and the consequences are chaos for everybody in society.

James Baldwin

#13. White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this - which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never - the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed. People

James Baldwin

#14. In those days my mother was given to the exasperating and mysterious habit of having babies.

James Baldwin

#15. You're getting to be a big boy,' I said desperately, 'it's time you started thinking about your future.'
'I'm thinking about my future,' said Sonny, grimly. 'I think about it all the time.

James Baldwin

#16. You know, it's not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.

James Baldwin

#17. Our crown has already been bought and paid for. All we have to do is wear it

James Baldwin

#18. Everybody's journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.

James Baldwin

#19. The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did
which was to hide.

James Baldwin

#20. Time catches up with kingdoms and crushes them, gets its teeth into doctrines and rends them; time reveals the foundations on which any kingdom rests, and eats at those foundations, and it destroys doctrines by proving them to be untrue.

James Baldwin

#21. When the white man came to Africa, the white man had the Bible and the African had the land, but now it is the white man who is being, reluctantly and bloodily, separated from the land, and the African who is still attempting to digest or to vomit up the Bible.

James Baldwin

#22. Our humanity is our burden, our life. We need not battle for it. We need only to do what is infinitely more difficult: that is, accept it.

James Baldwin

#23. You face reality, not the lights. The lights go off as quickly as they come on.

James Baldwin

#24. But people can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life. I

James Baldwin

#25. The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.

James Baldwin

#26. Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.

James Baldwin

#27. You don't know, and there's no way in the world for you to find out, what it's like to be a black girl in this world, and the way white men, and black men, too, baby, treat you.

James Baldwin

#28. Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.

James Baldwin

#29. Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.

James Baldwin

#30. People can cry much easier than they can change.

James Baldwin

#31. To be liberated from the stigma of blackness by embracing it is to cease, forever, one's interior argument and collaboration with the authors of one's degradation. It abruptly reduces the white enemy to a contest merely physical, which he can win only physically.

James Baldwin

#32. Perhaps now, though, he had hit bottom. One thing about the bottom, he told himself, you can't fall any further. He tried to take comfort from this thought. Yet there knocked in his heart the suspicion that the bottom did not really exist.

James Baldwin

#33. It seemed, then, that a lifetime would not be long enough for me to act with Joey the act of love.

James Baldwin

#34. If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go.

James Baldwin

#35. An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.

James Baldwin

#36. Everyone wishes to be loved, but in the event, nearly no one can bear it. Everyone desires love but also finds it impossible to believe that he deserves it.

James Baldwin

#37. It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I'd been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.

James Baldwin

#38. I think people ought to do what they want to do, what else are they alive for?

James Baldwin

#39. He prayeth best, who loveth best All things both great and small; For the dear God who loveth us, He made and loveth all.

James Baldwin

#40. ...they ain't never met nobody they didn't lie to and steal from.

James Baldwin

#41. The relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others in order to end the racial nightmare and acheive our country.

James Baldwin

#42. Their singing caused him to believe in the presence of the Lord; indeed, it was no longer a question of belief, because they made that presence real.

James Baldwin

#43. We've got to be as clear-headed about human beings as possible, because we are still each other's only hope.

James Baldwin

#44. Artists are the only people in a society who will tell that society the truth about itself.

James Baldwin

#45. I was guilty and irritated and full of love and pain. I wanted to kick him and I wanted to take him in my arms.

James Baldwin

#46. A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.

James Baldwin

#47. If you think of them as dirty, then they will be dirty- they will be dirty because you will be giving nothing

James Baldwin

#48. I hope that nobody has ever had to look at anybody they love through glass.

James Baldwin

#49. The black man in our midst carried murder in his heart, he wanted vengeance. We carried murder too, we wanted peace.

James Baldwin

#50. She, who had descended with such joy and pain, had begun her upward climb - upward, with her baby, on the steep, steep side of the mountain.

James Baldwin

#51. It is quite impossible to write a worth-while novel about a Jew or a Gentile or a Homosexual, for people refuse, unhappily, to function in so neat and one-dimensional a fashion.

James Baldwin

#52. History is not a procession of illustrious people. It's about what happens to a people. Millions of anonymous people is what history is about.

James Baldwin

#53. I had decided to allow no room in the universe for something which shamed and frightened me.

James Baldwin

#54. The burden of his salvation seemed to be on me and I could not endure it.

James Baldwin

#55. It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.

James Baldwin

#56. It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have. --The Price of the Ticket, "No Name in the Street" (1972; repr. 1985) The

James Baldwin

#57. Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.

James Baldwin

#58. It is your responsibility to change the society if you think yourself as an educated person

James Baldwin

#59. A real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things that can be named.

James Baldwin

#60. I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.

James Baldwin

#61. The people who think of themselves as White have the choice of becoming human or irrelevant.

James Baldwin

#62. And there was something so artless in this smile that I had to smile back.

James Baldwin

#63. Time is always now. Everybody who has ever thought about his own life knows this. You don't make resolutions about something you are going to do next year. No! You decide to write a book: the book may be finished twenty years from now, but you've got to start it now.

James Baldwin

#64. Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be

James Baldwin

#65. ...love brought you here. If you trusted love this far, don't panic now.

James Baldwin

#66. The sons of the masters were roaming the world, looking for arms to hold them. And the arms that might have held them
could not forgive.

James Baldwin

#67. I am what time, circumstance, and history have made of me, certainly, but i am also much more than that. So are we all.

James Baldwin

#68. 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 are all those other faces which were his.

James Baldwin

#69. We stared at each other across a narrow space that was full of danger, that almost seemed to roar, like flame.

'Come,' he said.

James Baldwin

#70. She was so incredibly beautiful - she seemed to be wearing the sunlight, rearranging it around her from time to time, with a movement of one hand, with a movement of her head, and with her smile - that, when she paid the man and started out of the store, I started out behind her.

James Baldwin

#71. Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise.

James Baldwin

#72. This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you should perish.

James Baldwin

#73. Yet one must also recognize that morality is based on ideas and that all ideas are dangerous - dangerous because ideas can only lead to action and where the action leads no man can say.

James Baldwin

#74. I don't know, now, when I first looked at Hella and found her stale, found her body uninteresting, her presence grating. It seemed to happen all at once - I suppose that only means that it had been happening for a long time.

James Baldwin

#75. Money, iit turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of otherthings if you did.

James Baldwin

#76. It comes as a great shock ... to discover that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance ... has not pledged allegiance to you. It comes as a great shock to see Gary Cooper killing off the Indians, and although you are rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians are you.

James Baldwin

#77. Come out, come out, wherever you are!

James Baldwin

#78. To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.

James Baldwin

#79. One can give nothing whatever without giving oneself - that is to say, risking oneself.If one cannot risk oneself, then one is spimply incapable of giving

James Baldwin

#80. Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.

James Baldwin

#81. The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.

James Baldwin

#82. I remembered that life in that room seemed to be occuring beneath the sea, time flowed past indiffrently above us, hours and days had no meaning.

James Baldwin

#83. It was a gesture of great despair and I knew that she was giving herself, not to me, but to that lover who would never come.

James Baldwin

#84. 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

#85. We do not trust educated people and rarely, alas, produce them, for we do not trust the independence of mind which alone makes a genuine education possible.

James Baldwin

#86. In this endeavor to wed the vision of the Old World with that of the New, it is the writer, not the statesman, who is our strongest arm. Though we do not wholly believe it yet, the interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world.

James Baldwin

#87. It is entirely unacceptable that I should have no voice in the political affairs of my own country, for I am not a ward of America; I am one of the first Americans to arrive on these shores.

James Baldwin

#88. Hatred is always self hatred, and there is something suicidal about it.

James Baldwin

#89. And here I was, left with only myself to deal with. It was entirely up to me.

James Baldwin

#90. She was like a wild animal who didn't know whether to come to the outstretched hand or to flee and kept making startled little rushes, first in one direction and then in the other.

James Baldwin

#91. To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.

James Baldwin

#92. All the western nations are caught in a lie, the lie of their pretended humanism: this means that their history has no moral justification, and that the West has no moral authority.

James Baldwin

#93. And I was yet aware that this was only a moment, that the world waited outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched above us, longer than the sky.

James Baldwin

#94. The writer's only real task: to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art

James Baldwin

#95. People can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.

James Baldwin

#96. The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.

James Baldwin

#97. We are very cruelly trapped between what we would like to be and what we actually are. And we cannot possibly become what we would like to be until we are willing to ask ourselves just why the lives we lead on this continent are mainly so empty, so tame, and so ugly.

James Baldwin

#98. It doesn't do any good to fight with Sonny. Sonny just moves back, inside himself, where he can't be reached.

James Baldwin

#99. But that battered word, truth, having made its appearance here, confronts one immediately with a series of riddles and has, moreover, since so many gospels are preached, the unfortunate tendency to make one belligerent.

James Baldwin

#100. Passion is not friendly. It is arrogant,
superbly contemptuous of all that is not
itself, and, as they very definition of passion
implies the impulse to freedom, it has a might
intimidiating power. It contains a challenge.
It contains an unspeakable hope.

James Baldwin