Quotes from James Baldwin

It takes a holy man to make a girl a real whore.

All during the trip home David seemed preoccupied. When he finally sought out Johnnie he found him sitting by himself on the top deck, shivering a little in the night air. He sat down beside him. After a moment Johnnie moved and put his head on David's shoulder. David put his arms around him. But now where there had been peace there was only panic and where there had been safety, danger, like a flower, opened.

Starlings circle in the sky, conspiring, together, and alone, unspeakable journeys into and out of the light.

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense once the hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.

Just as the birds above our heads circling are singing, knowing that, in what lies before them, the always unknown passage, wind, water, air, the failing light the failing night the blinding sun they must get the journey done. Listen. They have wings and voices are making choices are using what they have. They are aware that, on long journeys, each bears the other, whirring, stirring love occuring in the middle of the terrifying air.

To open your mouth in England is...to put your business in the street: You have confessed your parents, your youth, your school, your salary, your self-esteem, and, alas, your future.

And the education I can receive from an afternoon with Picasso, or from taking one of my nieces or nephews to the movies, is not at all what the state has in mind when it speaks of Education.

The necessity, then, of those "lesser breeds without the law"—those wogs, barbarians, niggers—is this: one must not become more free, not become more base than they: must not be used as they are used, nor yet use them as their abandonment allows one to use them: therefore, they must be civilized. But, when they are civilized, they may simply "spuriously imitate [the civilizer] back again," leaving the civilizer with no satisfaction on which to rest.

There is a blood-red thunder all around you, a blinding light flashes from time to time, voices roar and cease, roar and cease, you are in the grip of an unknowable agony, it is in your shoulders, your arms, your hands, your breath, an intolerable labor- and, no, it is not at all like approaching an orgasm, an orgasm implying relief, even, sometimes, however desperately, implying the hope of love. Love and death are connected, but not in the place I was that day.

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.

She knew that he was going to leave her. It was in his walk, his talk, his eyes. He wanted to go. He had already moved back, crouching to leap. And she had no rival. He was not going to another woman. He simply wanted to go. It would happen today, tomorrow, three weeks from today; it was over, she could do nothing about it; neither could she save herself by jumping first.

You're sweet, funnyface," he sometimes said, "but, you know, you aren't really very bright." She was scarcely at all mollified by his adding. "Thank heaven. I hate bright women.

The police are very sensitive about being accused of violating a suspect's constitutional rights – they are, indeed, as sensitive to any and all criticism as aging beauty queens – and would never have arrested Tony in the way that they did if they had not been certain that his accusation could never be heard.

She worked for a life insurance company that had only recently become sufficiently progressive to hire Negroes. This meant that she worked in an atmosphere so positively electric with interracial good will that no one ever dreamed of telling the truth about anything.

This was the summer in which they all abruptly began to grow older, their bodies becoming troublesome and awkward and even dangerous and their voices not to be trusted.

One way of gauging a nation's health, or of discerning what it really considers to be its interests—or to what extent it can be considered as a nation as distinguished from a coalition of special interests—is to examine those people it elects to represent or protect it.

The people who are running around throwing people in jail and ruining reputations and screaming about Communists wouldn't know one if he fell from the ceiling. And wouldn't care! What they are concerned about is propping up somehow the doctrine of white supremacy, so that they can seem to have given it up, but really still hold the power.

The saints of God were together and very conscious this morning of their being together and of their sainthood; and were determined that the less enlightened world should know who they were and remark upon it.

from T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom, is a kind of muted and updated, excruciatingly astute version of Rudyard Kipling's Gunga Din. The word "muted" does not refer to the musical score, which must be the loudest in the history of the cinema

You accept life as it is, you see it as it is before you can change it.

Joyce is right about history being a nightmare - but it may be the nightmare from which one *can* awaken. People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

The American sense of reality is dictated by what Americans are trying to avoid; and if you're trying to avoid reality, how can you face it?

Consider this," he said. "I am a French director who has never seen your country. I have never done you any harm, except, perhaps, historically—I mean, because I am white—but I cannot be blamed for that—" "But I can be," I said, "and I am! I've never understood why, if I have to pay for the history written in the color of my skin, you should get off scot-free!

Joyce is right about history being a nightmare - but it may be the nightmare from which no one *can* awaken. People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.