Quotes from James Baldwin

who watches German prisoners of war being treated by Americans with more human dignity than he has ever received at their hands.

She is a beautiful woman. She may not be beautiful to look at, whatever the fuck that means in this kingdom of the blind.

He longed for a light that would teach him, forever and forever, and beyond all question, the way to go; for a power that would bind him, forever and forever, and beyond all crying, to the love of God... For it was time that filled his mind, time that was violent with the mysterious love of God

It became in his imagination his impossible, lifelong task, his hard trial, like that of a man he had read about somewhere, whose curse it was to push a boulder up a steep hill, only to have the giant who guarded the hill roll the boulder down again—and so on, forever, throughout eternity; he was still out there, that hapless man, somewhere at the other end of the earth, pushing his boulder up the hill.

And if it's children you're after, well, you can do that in five minutes and you you haven't got to love anybody to do it. If all the children who get here every year were brought here by love, wow! baby, what a bright world this would be!

There is something fantastic in the spectacle I now present to myself of having run so far, so hard, across the ocean even, only to find myself brought up short once more before the bulldog in my own backyard — the yard, in the meantime, having grown smaller and the bulldog bigger.

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them. Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced. Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

That door is the gateway he has sought so long out of this dirty world, this dirty body. It

It's a miracle to realize that somebody loves you:

I won't stop being intelligent. I'll read and argue and think and all that—and I'll make a great point of not thinking your thoughts—and you'll be pleased because I'm sure the resulting confusion will cause you to see that I've only got a finite woman's mind, after all.

I remembered my mother's insistence that I always wear clean underwear because I might get knocked down by a car on the way to or from school and I and the family would be disgraced even beyond the grave, presumably, if my underwear was dirty. And I began to worry, in fact, as the doctor sniffed and prodded, about the state of the shorts I was wearing. This made me want to laugh. But I could not breathe.

Lord, when you send the rain think about it, please, a little? Do not get carried away by the sound of falling water, the marvelous light on the falling water. I am beneath that water. It falls with great force and the light Blinds me to the light.

My soul is a witness for my Lord. There was an awful silence at the bottom of John's mind, a dreadful weight, a dreadful speculation. And not even a speculation, but a deep, deep turning, as of something huge, black, shapeless, for ages dead on the ocean floor, that now felt its rest disturbed by a faint, far wind, which bid it: 'Arise

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, we must wait. What are they waiting for?

And they didn't even read; 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.

nobody stays in the garden of Eden.

You don't have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.

it became a stranger's face—or it made me so guilty to look on him that I wished it were a stranger's face. Not all my memorizing had prepared me for the metamorphosis which my memorizing had helped to bring about.

But if women are supposed to be led by men and there aren't any men to lead them, what happens then? What happens then?

I sometimes think, with despair, that Americans will swallow whole any political speech whatever—we've been doing very little else, these last, bad years

The people did not go away, of course; once a people arise, they never go away (a fact which should be included in the Marine handbook).

Well, isn't it true? You don't have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.

You want to leave Giovanni because he makes you stink. You want to despise Giovanni because he is not afraid of the stink of love. You want to kill him in the name of all your lying little moralities. And you—you are immoral. You are, by far, the most immoral man I have met in all my life. Look, look what you have done to me. Do you think you could have done this if I did not love you? Is this what you should do to love?

But the aims of life are antithetical to those of the dreamer, and the teeth of the world are sharp.