Quotes from James Baldwin

He was still big, black, and loud; at the age of twenty-three—he is a little older than Fonny—he was already running out of familiar faces.

It is a terrible thing, simply, to be trapped in one's history, and attempt, in the same motion (and in this, our life!) to accept, deny, reject, and redeem it--and, also, on whatever level, to profit from it.

The tragedy of this country now is that most of the people who say they care about it do not care. What they care about is their safety and their profits. What they care about is not rocking the boat. What they care about is the continuation of white supremacy, so that white liberals who are with you in principle will move out when you move in.

I take the blue envelope which Jacques has sent me and tear it slowly into many pieces, watching them dance in the wind, watching the wind carry them away. Yet, as I turn and begin walking toward the waiting people, the wind blows some of them back on me.

Touch, but no contact. All touch, but no contact and no light.

All doormen, for example, and all policemen have by now, for me, become exactly the same, and my style with them is designed simply to intimidate them before they can intimidate me. No doubt I am guilty of some injustice here, but it is irreducible, since I cannot risk assuming that the humanity of these people is more real to them than their uniforms.

One day, when you're happy, try to forgive me.

seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death—ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.

something opened in my brain, a secret, noiseless door swung open, frightening me

Someone once said to me that the people in general cannot bear very much reality. He meant by this that they prefer fantasy to a truthful recreation of their experience. People have quite enough reality to bear, by simply getting through their lives, raising their children, dealing with the eternal conundrums of birth, taxes, and death.

he had received the blow from which he never would recover and this no one wanted to believe. Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me? The men on the stand stayed with him, cool and at a little distance, adding and questioning and corroborating, holding it down as well as they could with an ironical self-mockery; but each man knew that the boy was blowing for every one of them.

I was at the door with my suitcase. With my hand on the knob, I looked at him. Then I wanted to beg him to forgive me. But this would have been too great a confession; any yielding at that moment would have locked me forever in that room with him.

If I could make you stay, I would," he shouted. "If I had to beat you, chain you, starve you—if I could make you stay, I would." He turned back into the room; the wind blew his hair. He shook his finger at me, grotesquely playful. "One day, perhaps, you will wish I had.

It is one thing to overthrow a dictator or to repel and invader and quite another thing really to achieve a revolution.

Giovanni," I said, helplessly, "be careful. Please be careful." He gave me an ironical smile. "Thank you," he said. "You should have given me that advice the night we met.

But I know about suffering; if that helps. I know that it ends. I ain't going to tell you no lies, like it always ends for the better. Sometimes it ends for the worse. You can suffer so bad that you can be driven to a place where you can't ever suffer again: and that's worse.

Before you came I wanted to die, I have told you many times. It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody.

It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death — ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.

Ah! I am told that New York is very beautiful. Is it more beautiful than Paris?' 'Oh, no,' I said, 'no city is more beautiful than Paris'.

I have never reached you, said Giovanni. You have never really been here.

To remember it so clearly, so painfully tonight tells me that I have never for an instant truly forgotten it.

I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be "accepted" by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don't wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet

I have been alone so long—I do not think I would be able to live if I had to be alone again.

His courtesy is as real as her trouble.