James Baldwin Quotes

246 Sourced Quotes

You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important.

James Baldwin
It will be a great day for America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous and tasteless foam rubber that we have substituted for it. And I am not being frivolous here, either. Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here, and become as joyless as they have become.

James Baldwin
Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.

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

James Baldwin
Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.

James Baldwin
Whereas England may have been doomed to civilize the world, no power under heaven can civilize England.

James Baldwin
To accept one's past—one's history—is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it.

James Baldwin
Art has to be a kind of confession. I don't mean a true confession in the sense of that dreary magazine. The effort it seems to me, is: if you can examine and face your life, you can discover the terms with which you are connected to other lives, and they can discover them, too — the terms with which they are connected to other people.

James Baldwin
Every form is difficult, no one is easier than another. They all kick your ass.

James Baldwin
The darkest hour
is just before the dawn,
and that, I see,
which does not guarantee
power to draw the next breath,
nor abolish the suspicion
that the brightest hour
we will ever see
occurs just before we cease
to be.

James Baldwin
We've got to be as clear-headed about human beings as possible, because we are still each other's only hope.

James Baldwin
The establishment of democracy on the American continent was scarcely as radical a break with the past as was the necessity, which Americans faced, of broadening this concept to include black men.

James Baldwin
I'm optimistic about the future, but not about the future of this civilization. I'm optimistic about the civilization which will replace this one.

James Baldwin
This is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it.... It is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.

James Baldwin
Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?

James Baldwin
The wretched of the earth do not decide to become extinct, they resolve, on the contrary, to multiply: life is their weapon against life, life is all that they have.

James Baldwin
The white man, someone told me, discovered the Cross by way of the Bible, but the Black man discovered the Bible by way of the Cross.

James Baldwin
When I was very young, and was dealing with my buddies in those wine- and urine-stained hallways, something in me wondered, What will happen to all that beauty? For black people, though I am aware that some of us, black and white, do not know it yet, are very beautiful.

James Baldwin
I'm going to have my baby and I'm going to bring him up to be a man.

James Baldwin
If all you want to do is make money, the very last thing you need is imagination.

James Baldwin
It is only because the world looks on his talent with such a frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make his talent important.

James Baldwin
Negro servants have been smuggling odds and ends out of white homes for generations, and white people have been delighted to have them do it, because it has assuaged a dim guilt and testified to the intrinsic superiority of white people.

James Baldwin
You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.

James Baldwin
There was no room in God's army for the coward heart, no crown awaiting him who put mother or father, sister or brother, sweetheart or friend above God's will. Let the church cry amen to this!

James Baldwin
Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel.

James Baldwin
An identity is questioned only when it is menaced, as when the mighty begin to fall, or when the wretched begin to rise, or when the stranger enters the gates, never, thereafter, to be a stranger.

James Baldwin
The hope of the world lies in what one demands, not of others, but of oneself.

James Baldwin
One day, to everyone's astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up.

James Baldwin
A writer has to take all the risks of putting down what he sees.

James Baldwin
I stand at the window of this great house in the south of France as night falls, the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life.

James Baldwin