Quotes from James Baldwin

You don't know how much I needed to hear from you. I wanted to write you many a time but I dug how much I must have hurt you and so I didn't write. But now I feel like a man who's been trying to climb up out of some deep, really deep and funky hole and just saw the sun up there, outside. I got to get outside.

We're getting old, he thought, and it damn sure didn't take long.

He laughed. 'Baby. Baby. Baby. I love you. And I'm going to build us a table and a whole lot of folks are going to be eating off it for a long, long time to come.

We cannot escape our origins, however hard we try, those origins which contain the key -could we but find it- to all we later become

But he had the tendency of all wildly disorganised people to suppose that the lives of others were tamer and less sensual and more cerebral than his own.

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.

I saw myself, sharply, as a wanderer, an adventurer, rocking through the world, unanchored. [...] The wind of my life was blowing me away. [...] I take the blue envelope...and tear it slowly into many pieces, watching them dance in the wind, watching the wind carry them away. Yet as I turn and begin walking toward the waiting people, the wind blows some of them back on me.

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.

A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled. A child cannot be taught by anyone whose demand, essentially, is that the child repudiate his experience, and all that gives him sustenance.

He may be a very nice man. But I haven't got the time to figure that out. All I know is, he's got a uniform and a gun and I have to relate to him that way. That's the only way to relate to him because one of us may have to die.

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

Years ago, when he was around fourteen, he'd been all hipped on the idea of going to India. He read books about people sitting on rocks, naked, in all kinds of weather, but mostly bad, naturally, and walking barefoot through hot coals and arriving at wisdom. I used to say that it sounded to me as though they were getting away from wisdom as fast as they could. I think he sort of looked down on me for that.

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.

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

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.

Well, I may or may not be bitter, but if I were I would have good reasons for it: chief among them that American blindness, or cowardice, which allows us to pretend that life presents no reasons for being bitter.

Maybe everything bad that happens to you makes you weaker, said Giovanni, as though he had not heard me, and so you can stand less and less.

On days like this, Cass said, suddenly, I remember what it was like--I think I remember--to be young, very young. She looked up at him. When everything, touching and tasting--everything--was so new, and even suffering was wonderful because it was so complete.

The poor are always crossing the Sahara. And the lawyers and bondsmen and all that crowd circle around the poor, exactly like vultures. Of course, they're not any richer than the poor, really, that's why they've turned into vultures, scavengers, indecent garbage men, and I'm talking about the black cats, too, who, in so many ways, are worse.

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

Every man in the chapel hoped that when his hour came he, too, would be eulogized, which is to say forgiven, and that all of his lapses, greeds, errors, and strayings from the truth would be invested with coherence and looked upon with charity. This was perhaps the last thing humans could give each other and it was what they demanded, after all, of the Lord.

You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a 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.

It is not a racial problem. It is a problem of whether or not you're willing to look at your life and be responsible for it, and then begin to change it.

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.