Quotes from James Baldwin

I think that people can be better than that, and I know that people van 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.

The great question that faced him this morning was whether or not he had ever, really, been present at his life. For if he had ever been present, then he was present still, and his world would open up before him.

one is permitted to treat any group of people with special disfavor because of their race or the color of their skin, there is no limit to what one will force them to endure, and, since the entire race has been mysteriously indicted, no reason not to attempt to destroy it root and branch.

The baby was restless, and I was scared. It was almost time. I was so tired, I almost wanted to die. For a long time, because he was in solitary, I had not been able to see Fonny. I had seen him on this day. He was so skinny; he was so bruised: I almost cried out. To whom, where? I saw this question in Fonny's enormous, slanted black eyes–– eyes that burned, now, like the eyes of a prophet. Yet, when he grinned, I saw, all over again, my lover, as though for the first time.

But these men are your brothers - your lost, younger brothers. And if the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it. For this is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what America must become.

white Americans congratulate themselves on the 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation in the schools; they suppose, in spite of the mountain of evidence that has since accumulated to the contrary, that this was proof of a change of heart—or, as they like to say, progress.

I am too various to be trusted. If this were not so I would not be alone in this house tonight.

Sometimes you were here all day long and you read or you opened the window or you cooked something - and I watched you - and you never said anything - and you looked at me with such eyes, as though you did not see me. All day, while I worked to make this room for you.

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 think: One day I will go home.

Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here, and become as joyless as they have become. It is this individual uncertainty on the part of white American men and women, this inability to renew themselves at the fountain of their own lives, that makes the discussion, let alone elucidation, of any conundrum—that is, any reality—so supremely difficult.

I had thought of suicide when I was much younger, as, possibly, we all have, but then it would have been for revenge, it would have been my way of informing the world how awfully it made me suffer.

One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.

I mean, I think you've got to be truthful about the life you have. Otherwise, there's no possibility of achieving the life you want.

the slackness of their bodies making vivid the history of their degradation

One can give nothing whatever without giving oneself—that is to say, risking oneself.

White America remains unable to believe that black America's grievances are real; they are unable to believe this because they cannot face what this fact says about themselves and their country; and the effect of this massive and hostile incomprehension is to increase the danger in which all black people live here, especially the young.

We don't know enough about ourselves. I think it's better to know that you don't know, that way you can grow with the mystery as the mystery grows in you. But, these days, of course, everybody knows everything, that's why so many people, especially most white people, are so lost.

they stormed all over me, my awakening, my insistent possibilities.

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

But the fact that I had said it as he held my hand made it sound to me unutterably helpless and soft and coy.

It was he who, unforgivably, taught her that there are people in the world for whom coming along is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.

Most Negroes cannot risk assuming that the humanity of white people is more real to them than their color. And this leads, imperceptibly but inevitably, to a state of mind in which, having long ago learned to expect the worst, one finds it very easy to believe the worst.

The question of color was but another detail, somewhere between being six feet tall and being six feet under.

In any case, white people, who had robbed black people of their liberty and who profited by this theft every hour that they lived, had no moral ground on which to stand. They had the judges, the juries, the shotguns, the law—in a word, power. But it was a criminal power, to be feared but not respected, and to be outwitted in any way whatever.