Quotes from James Baldwin

To look around the United States today is enough to make prophets and angels weep. This is not the land of the free; it is only sporadically the home of the brave.

Books taught me that things that tormented me the most were the very things that connected me to everyone who is alive and who had ever been alive.

not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour… – for the lack of it.

But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.

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.

she was disquietingly fluid—fluid without, however, being able to flow. I felt a hardness and a constriction in her, a grave mistrust, created already by too many men like me ever to be conquered now.

I don't believe there's a white man in this country, baby, who can get his dick hard, without he hear some nigger moan.

I know what I'm asking is impossible. But in our time, as in every time, the impossible is the least that one can demand-and one is, after all, emboldened by the spectacle of human history in general, and the American Negro history in particular, for it testifies to nothing less than the perpetual achievement of the impossible.

it is the responsibility of free men to trust and celebrate what is constant—birth, struggle, and death are constant, and so is love, though we may not always think so—and to apprehend the nature of change, to be able and willing to change.

It goes without saying, I believe, that if we understood ourselves better, we would damage ourselves less.

This was not the man they had known, but they had scarcely expected to be confronted with him ; this was, in a sense deeper than questions of fact, the man they had not known, and the man they had not known may have been the real one. The real man, whoever he had been, had suffered and now he was dead: this was all that was sure and all that mattered now.

This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.

No. It would help if I were able to feel guilty.But the end of innocence is also the end of guilt (112)

Tell me,' he said, 'what is this thing about time? Why is it better to be late than early? People are always saying, we must wait. What are they waiting for?

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.

There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who know that he is going under in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man.

Don't think I don't know you love me. You believe we going to make it?

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 is you

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.

We spend vast amounts of our time an emotional energy in learning how not to be natural and in eluding the trap of our own nature and it therefore becomes very difficult to know exactly what is meant when we speak of the unnatural. It is not possible to have it both ways, to use nature at one time as the final arbiter of human conduct and at another to oppose her as angrily as we do.

I don't give a damn if there's any hope for them or not. But I know that I am not about to be bugged by any more white jokers who still can't figure out whether I'm human or not. If they don't know, baby, sad on them, and I hope they drop dead slowly, in great pain.

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.

It ain't only the bad ones, nor yet the dumb ones that gets sucked under.

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