Quotes from James Baldwin

What a great difference there is,' she said, 'between dreaming of something and dealing with it!

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.

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.

No matter how it seems now, I must confess: I loved him. I do not think that I will ever love anyone like that again.

I thought she would be fun to have fun with.

The life you think you should want,' said Eric, 'is always the life that looks safest.

Why, you will go home and then you will find that home is not home anymore. Then you will really be in trouble. As long as you stay here, you can always think: One day I will go home.

An identity is questioned only when it is menaced...Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self...

Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one's sense of one's own reality. Well, the black man has functioned in the white man's world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar: and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations.

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

The world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.

all that befell: in her joys, her pipe in the evening, her man at night, the children she suckled, and guided on their first short steps; and in her tribulations, death, and parting, and the lash, she did not forget that deliverance was promised and would surely come. She had only to endure and trust in God.

The brutality with which Negroes are treated in this country simply cannot be overstated, however unwilling white men may be to hear it. In

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

His body, which I had come to know so well, glowed in the light and charged and thickened the air between us. Then something opened in my brain, a secret, noiseless door swung open, frightening me: it had not occurred to me until that instant that, in fleeing from his body, I confirmed and perpetuated his body's power over me.

The woman on the bed was old, her life was fading as the mist rose. She thought of her mother as already in the grave; and she would not let herself be strangled by the hands of the dead. "I'm going, Ma," she said. "I got to go.

The dream of safety dies hard.

I am not trying to be méchant when I talk about women. I respect women—very much—for their inside life, which is not like the life of a man.

To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.

There seems to be a vast amount of confusion in the Western world concerning these matters, but love and sexual activity are not synonymous: Only by becoming inhuman can the human being pretend that they are. The mare is not obliged to love the stallion, nor is the bull required to love the cow. They are doing what comes naturally.

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

But as long as we in the West place on color the value that we do, we make it impossible for the great unwashed to consolidate themselves according to any other principle. Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.

It would help if I were able to feel guilty. But the end of innocence is also the end of guilt.

I can conceive of no Negro native to this country who has not, by the age of puberty, been irreparably scarred by the conditions of his life. All over Harlem, Negro boys and girls are growing into stunted maturity, trying desperately to find a place to stand; and the wonder is not that so many are ruined but that so many survive.