Top 100 Quotes About James Baldwin
#1. When I was in graduate school, my thesis included both poetry and essays. Influenced by the personal essays of James Baldwin and Norman Mailer, I loved the form, but pretty much stopped.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#2. Yet it is only when one is able, without bitterness or self-pity, to surrender a dream one has long cherished, or a privilege one has long possessed, that one is set free ... that one has set oneself free, for higher dreams, for greater privileges. James Baldwin
James Baldwin
#3. People pay for that they do, and still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become. And the pay for it simply: by the lives they lead. - James Baldwin
Dorothy Allison
#4. I am a big devourer of James Baldwin.
Don Lemon
#5. James Baldwin's words haunt: "People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster." Are we a nation of monsters?
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
#6. When I was 10, I read James Baldwin's 'Another Country,' and that book broke me. Not because I was encountering homosexual sex and love for the first time, but because the way James wrote about it made it impossible for me to attach otherness to it. 'Here,' Jimmy said. 'Here is love, all of it.
Chris Abani
#7. To take a few nouns, and a few pronouns, and adverbs and adjectives, and put them together, ball them up, and throw them against the wall to make them bounce. That's what Norman Mailer did. That's what James Baldwin did, and Joan Didion did, and that's what I do - that's what I mean to do.
Maya Angelou
#8. She struggled to think of anyone besides perhaps James Baldwin and Jesus who had experiences the profound isolation and loenliness she now knew to be the one and only true reality of this world.
Zadie Smith
#9. 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
Roland Merullo
#10. I remember what it was like ... to be young, very young. When everything, touching and tasting-everything- was so new, and even suffering was wonderful because it was so complete.
James Baldwin
James Baldwin
#11. But it's not possible to forget anybody you were that hung up on, who was that hung up on you. You can't forget anything that hurt so badly, went so deep, and changed the world forever. It's not possible to forget anybody you've destroyed.
James Baldwin
#12. There appears to be a vast amount of confusion on this point, but I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be "accepted" by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don't wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet.
James Baldwin
#13. Observing that, from this height, the city which had been so dark as he walked through it seemed to be on fire.
James Baldwin
#14. I remember what it was ... to be young, very young. When everything, touching and tasting-everything- was so new, and even suffering was wonderful because it was so complete.
James Baldwin
#15. 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
#16. And no matter what I was doing, another me sat in my belly, absolutely cold with terror over the question of my life.
James Baldwin
#17. It is astonishing that in a country so devoted to the individual, so many people should be afraid to speak.
James A. Baldwin
#18. I hoped to burn out, through Hella, my image of Giovanni and the reality of his touch - I hoped to drive out fire with fire.
James Baldwin
#19. Elisha,' he said, 'no matter what happens to me, where I go, what folks say about me, no matter what anybody says, you remember - please remember - I was saved. I was there.
James Baldwin
#20. 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
#21. The poets, by which I mean all artists, are finally the only people that know the truth about us. Soldiers don't, statesmen don't, priests don't, union leaders don't ... only the poets.
James Baldwin
#22. If the world wasn't so full of dead folks maybe those of us that's trying to live wouldn't have to suffer so bad.
James Baldwin
#24. People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
James Baldwin
#25. Experience, which destroys innocence, also leads one back to it.
James A. Baldwin
#26. 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 always now.
James Baldwin
#27. There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves. People are not, for example, terribly anxious to be equal (equal, after all, to what and to whom?) but they love the idea of being superior.
James Baldwin
#28. He wanted me to come home
to come home, as he said, and settle down, and whenever he said that I thought of the sediment at the bottom of a stagnant pond.
James Baldwin
#29. But what was the point, the purpose, of my salvation if it did not permit me to behave with love toward others, no matter how they behaved toward me? What others did was their responsibility, for which they would answer when the judgment trumpet sounded.
James Baldwin
#30. You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don't live the only life you have, you won't live some other life, you won't live any life at all.
James Baldwin
#31. I prefer sinners and madmen, who can learn, who can change, who can teach-or people like myself, if I may say so, who are not afraid to eat a lobster alone as they take on their shoulders the monumental weight of thirty years
James Baldwin
#32. The real troubles with living is that living is so banal. Everyone, after all, goes the same dark road - and the road has a trick of being the most dark, most treacherous, when it seems most bright - and it's true that nobody stays in the garden of Eden.
James Baldwin
#33. When human rights are abused on a grand scale, the broth of purity boils and feeds the rebellion of a new order.
James A. Baldwin
#34. In Socrates' thought the two marks of individual self-consciousness appear; it is practical and it is social.
James Mark Baldwin
#35. For nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.
James Baldwin
#36. There's no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it.
James Baldwin
#37. Now, for the first time, I began to be aware of my heart, the heart itself: and with this awareness, conscious terror came. I realized that I knew nothing whatever about the way we are put together; and I realized that what I did not know might be in the process of killing me.
James Baldwin
#38. 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
#39. It had been so once; it had almost been so once. I could make it so again, I could make it real. It only demanded a short, hard strength for me to become myself again.
James Baldwin
#40. People are full of surprise, even for themselves, if they have been stirred enough.
James Baldwin
#42. Hope? The word seemed to bang from wall to wall. Hope? No, I don't think there's any hope. We're too empty here ... She touched her heart. This isn't a country at all, it's a collection of football players and Eagle Scouts. Cowards. We think we're happy. We're not. We're doomed.
James Baldwin
#43. Heavenly witnesses are a tricky lot, to be used by whoever is closest to Heaven at the time. And legend and theology, which are designed to sanctify our fears, crimes, and aspirations, also reveal them for what they are.
James Baldwin
#44. 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 contemptuous of other people's pain.
James Baldwin
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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.
James Baldwin
#49. Negro servants have been smuggling odds and ends out of white homes for generations, and white people have been delighted to have them do it, because it has assuaged a dim guilt and testified to the intrinsic superiority of white people.
James A. Baldwin
#50. 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
#51. He was one of those poets who escaped the terrors of writing by writing all the time.
James Baldwin
#52. Wash me, cried the slave to his Maker, and I shall be whiter, whiter than snow!
James Baldwin
#53. Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.
James A. Baldwin
#54. The writer's greed is appalling. He wants, or seems to want, everything and practically everybody, in another sense, and at the same time, he needs no one at all.
James A. Baldwin
#55. There is no way of conveying to the corpse the reasons you have made him one
you have the corpse, and you are, thereafter, at themercy of a fact which missed the truth, which means that the corpse has you.
James A. Baldwin
#56. John's heart was hardened against the Lord. His father was God's minister, the ambassador of the King of Heaven, and John could not bow before the throne of grace without first kneeling to his father.
James Baldwin
#57. The establishment of democracy on the American continent was scarcely as radical a break with the past as was the necessity, which Americans faced, of broadening this concept to include black men.
James A. Baldwin
#58. 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 the people he was inventing, whose troubles he could bear.
James Baldwin
#59. I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do.
James Baldwin
#60. Drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.
James A. Baldwin
#61. Lord, that Hollywood train, forever coming round the bend!
James Baldwin
#62. 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
#63. All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.
James Baldwin
#64. Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.
James Baldwin
#65. He stood for a moment on the melting snow, distracted, and then began to run down the hill, feeling himself fly as the descent became more rapid, and thinking: I can climb back up. If it's wrong, I can always climb back up.
James Baldwin
#66. Those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.
James Baldwin
#67. Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
James Baldwin
#68. [Art is] very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important.
James Baldwin
#69. My progress report
concerning my journey to the palace of wisdom
is discouraging.
I lack certain indispensable aptitudes.
Furthermore, it appears
that I packed the wrong things.
James Baldwin
#70. Why, you will go home and then you will find that home is not home any more. Then you will really be in trouble. As long as you stay here, you can always think: One day I will go home.
James Baldwin
#71. People who cling to their illusions find it difficult, if not impossible, to learn anything worth learning: a people under the necessity of creating themselves must examine everything, and soak up learning the way the roots of a tree soak up water.
James Baldwin
#72. There are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people.
James Baldwin
#73. If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons.
James A. Baldwin
#74. No society can smash the social contract and be exempt from the consequences, and the consequences are chaos for everybody in society.
James Baldwin
#75. White people ... 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.
James Baldwin
#76. The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone.
James Baldwin
#77. Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore
James Baldwin
#78. The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.
James Baldwin
#79. Like all science, psychology is knowledge; and like science again, it is knowledge of a definite thing, the mind.
James Mark Baldwin
#80. The menfolk, they die, all right. And it's us women who walk around, like the Bible says, and mourn. The menfolk, they die, and it's over for them, but we women, we have to keep on living and try to forget what they done to us.
James Baldwin
#81. 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
#82. 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.
James Baldwin
#83. If one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected - those, precisely, who need the law's protection most! - and listens to their testimony.
James A. Baldwin
#84. You might feel different out there, with all the sunshine and oranges and all.
James Baldwin
#85. I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also so much more than that. So are we all.
James Baldwin
#86. Our people" have functioned in this country for nearly a century as political weapons, the trump card up the enemies' sleeve; anything promised Negroes at election time is also a threat leveled at the opposition; in the struggle for mastery the Negro is the pawn.
James Baldwin
#87. You don't need numbers; you need passion, and this is proven by the history of the world!
James A. Baldwin
#88. Most people ... find a disorientating mismatch between the long-term nature of their liabilities and the increasingly short-term nature of their assets.
James A. Baldwin
#89. Wisely, Baldwin insisted that we are always more than our pain. Not only did he believe in our capacity to love, he felt black people were uniquely situated to risk loving because we had suffered.
Bell Hooks
#90. There are people in the world for whom "coming along" is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.
James Baldwin
#91. Nobody can stay in the garden of Eden," Jacques said. And then: "I wonder why.
James Baldwin
#92. There are tears on his face, his face or mine, I don't know. I kiss him where our tears fall. I start to say something. He puts one finger on my lips. He smiles his little smile.
James Baldwin
#93. At bottom, to be colored means that one has been caught in some utterly unbelievable cosmic joke, a joke so hideous and in such bad taste that it defeats all categories and definitions.
James A. Baldwin
#94. You know, and I know, that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon.
James Baldwin
#95. If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, fire next time.
James A. Baldwin
#96. An identity is questioned only when it is menaced, as when the mighty begin to fall, or when the wretched begin to rise, or when the stranger enters the gates, never, thereafter, to be a stranger.
James A. Baldwin
#97. In order to have a conversation with someone you must reveal yourself.
James A. Baldwin
#98. I know that people can be better than they are. We are capable of bearing a great burden, once we discover that the burden is reality and arrive where reality is.
James Baldwin
#99. I think white gay people feel cheated because they were born, in principle, in a society in which they were supposed to be safe. The anomaly of their sexuality puts them in danger, unexpectedly.
James A. Baldwin
#100. In those days my mother was given to the exasperating and mysterious habit of having babies.
James Baldwin
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