Quotes from James Baldwin

A bill is coming in that I fear America is not prepared to pay.

Of course, I must say that I don't think America is God's gift to anybody—if it is, God's days have got to be numbered. That God these people say they serve—and do serve, in ways that they don't know—has got a very nasty sense of humor. Like you'd beat the shit out of Him, if He was a man. Or: if you were.

Confession Who knows more of Wanda, the wan, than I do? And who knows more of Terry, the torn, than I do? And who knows more than I do of Ziggy, the Zap, fleeing the rap, using his eyes and teeth to spring the trap, than I do!      Or did. Good Lord, forbid that morning's acre, held in the palm

For the horrors of the American Negro's life there has been almost no language.... And, in fact, the truth about the black man, as a historical entity and as a human being, has been hidden from him, deliberately and cruelly; the power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.

I ain't ashamed of it – I'm ashamed of you – you done made me feel a shame I ain't never felt before. I shamed before my God – to let somebody make me cheap, like you done done.

I was in a box for I could see that, no matter how I turned, the hour of confession was upon me and could scarcely be averted; unless of course, I leaped out of the cab, which would be the most terrible confession of all.

I guess it's true, what they used to tell me-- if you can get through the worst, you'll see the best

It is an extraordinary achievement to be trapped in the dungeon of color and to dare to shake down its walls and to step out of it, leaving the jailhouse keeper in the rubble

for you, and if love will not swing wide the gates, no other power will or can.

It is a terrible omen when you see an American flag on somebody else's car and realize that's your enemy.

Does she want you or does she not want you?' 'She went to Spain,' I said, 'to find out'. Giovanni open his eyes wide. He was indignant. 'To Spain. Why not to China? What is she doing, testing all the Spaniards and comparing them with you?

To begin with, the room was not large enough for two. It looked out on a small courtyard. 'Looked out' means only that the room had two windows, against which the courtyard malevolently pressed, encroaching day by day, as though it had confused itself with a jungle.

In the United States, violence and heroism have been made synonymous except when it comes to blacks

The subtle and deadly change of heart that might occur in you would be involved with the realization that a civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked, but only that they be spineless.

But above all—and this cannot be stressed strongly enough—meaning was always utmost. Despite a highly evolved aesthetic sensibility, despite a punishingly high level of artistic standards, Baldwin's goal was always to communicate, not to show off.

I had discovered, through ugly experience, what they were like when they held the power and what they were like when you held the power.

Perhaps now, though, he had hit bottom. One thing about the bottom, he told himself, you can't fall any farther. He tried to take comfort from this thought. Yet there knocked in his heart the suspicion that the bottom did not really exist.

That summer, in any case, all the fears with which I had grown up, and which were now a part of me and controlled my vision of the world, rose up like a wall between the world and me, and drove me into the church.

The necessity for a form of socialism is based on the observation that the world's present economic arrangements doom most of the world to misery; that the way of life dictated by these arrangements is both sterile and immoral; and, finally, that there is no hope for peace in the world so long as these arrangements obtain.

It is a fact that every American Negro bears a name that originally belonged to the white man whose chattel he was. I am called Baldwin because I was either sold by my African tribe or kidnapped out of it into the hands of a white Christian named Baldwin, who forced me to kneel at the foot of the cross. I am, then, both visibly and legally the descendant of slaves in a white, Protestant country, and this is what it means to be an American Negro, this is who he is—

You can only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls a nigger.

But to look back from the stony plain along the road which led one to that place is not at all the same thing as walking on the road; the perspective, to say the very least, changes only with the journey; only when the road has, all abruptly and treacherously, and with an absoluteness that permits no argument, turned or dropped or risen is one able to see all that one could not have seen from any other place.

and the whole place looked tired and discouraged, as though wearily about to shave and get dressed for a terrible evening.

how I stood, with my love and my ingenuity, between him and the dark.