Quotes from James Baldwin

I scarcely know how to describe that room. It became, in a way, every room I had ever been in and every room I find myself in hereafter will remind me of Giovanni's room. I did not really stay there very long—we met before the spring began and I left there during the summer—but it still seems to me that I spent a lifetime there. Life in that room seemed to be occurring underwater, as I say, and it is certain that I underwent a sea-change there.

It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.

Being in the pulpit was like being in the theatre; I was behind the scenes and knew how the illusion was worked. I knew the other ministers and knew the quality of their lives.

And yet—when one begins to search for the crucial, the definitive moment, the moment which changed all others, one finds oneself pressing, in great pain, through a maze of false signals and abruptly locking doors.

She wore the strangest smile I had ever seen. It was pained and vindictive and humiliated but she inexpertly smeared across this grimace a bright, girlish gaiety—as rigid as the skeleton beneath her flabby body. If fate ever allowed Sue to reach me, she would kill me with just that smile.

It is still not possible to overstate the price a negro pays to climb out of obscurity, for it is a particular price involved with being a negro, and the great wounds, gouges, amputations, losses, scars endured in such a journey cannot be calculated. But even this is not the worst of it.

it was a deeper, deadlier, and more subtle hypocrisy than that, and a little honest sensuality, or a lot, would have been like water in an extremely bitter desert.

this past, this endless struggle to achieve and reveal and confirm a human identity, human authority, yet contains, for all its horror, something very beautiful. I do not mean to be sentimental about suffering—enough is certainly as good as a feast—but people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are.

Negroes know about each other what can here be called family secrets. And this means that one negro, if he wishes, can knock the other's hustle, can give his game away.

If one is continually surviving the worst that life can bring, one eventually ceases to be controlled by a fear of what life can bring; whatever it brings must be borne. And at this level of experience one's bitterness begins to be palatable, and hatred becomes too heavy a sack to carry.

People are always saying, we must wait, we must wait. what are they waiting for?

Even the most incorrigible maverick has to be born somewhere. He may leave the group that produced him - he may be forced to - but nothing will efface his origins, the mark of which he carries with him everywhere. I think it is important to know this and even find it a matter for rejoicing, as the strongest people do, regardless of their station.

The poets, by which I mean all artists, are finally the only people that know the truth about us. Soldiers don't, statesmen don't, priests don't, union leaders don't…only the poets.

Una cosa o l'altra: ci vuole forza per ricordare, ci vuole un altro tipo di forza per dimenticare, ci vuole un eroe per fare le due cose insieme. Chi ricorda corteggia la pazzia attraverso il dolore, il dolore dell'eterno ritorno della morte alla propria innocenza; chi dimentica corteggia un altro tipo di follia, la follia della negazione del dolore e dell'odio per l'innocenza; e il mondo si divide per lo più tra pazzi che ricordano e pazzi che dimenticano. Gli eroi sono rari.

Much has been written of love turning to hatred, of the heart growing cold with the death of love. It is far more terrible than anything I have ever read about, more terrible than anything I will ever be able to say.

I have seen and heard and endured the secrets of desperate white men and women, which they knew were safe with me, because even if I should speak, no one would believe me.

I'm a big girl." "Honey," he said, "you ain't no bigger than a minute." She sighed. "Sometimes a minute can be a mighty powerful thing.

I missed the way the dark face closes, the way the dark eyes watch, the way the dark face opens and lights up the room.

but there is no reason that black men should be expected to be more patient, more forbearing, more farseeing than whites; indeed, quite the contrary. The real reason that nonviolence is considered to be a virtue in Negroes—I am not speaking now of its racial value, another matter altogether—is that white men do not want their lives, their self-image, or their property threatened.

If one is continually surviving the worst that life can bring, one eventually ceases to be controlled by a fear of what life can bring; whatever it brings must be borne. And at this level of experience one's bitterness begins to be palatable, and hatred becomes too heavy a sack to carry.

depressed populations don't have the time or energy to spare. The affluent populations, which should have been their help, didn't, as far as could be discovered, read, either—they merely bought books and devoured them, but not in order to learn: in order to learn new attitudes.

really mean that there was no love in the church. It was a mask for hatred and self-hatred and despair. The transfiguring power of the Holy Ghost ended when the service ended, and salvation stopped at the church door. When we were told to love everybody, I had thought that that meant everybody. But no. It applied only to those who believed as we did, and it did not apply to white people at all.

No. It would help if I were able to feel guilty. But the end of innocence is also the end of guilt. 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. And this might be a great relief if I did not also know that, when the knife has fallen, Giovanni, if he feels anything will feel relief.

It was the kind of encounter one watches with a smile simply because it is so rare that people enjoy one another.