James Baldwin Quotes

246 Sourced Quotes

If one can live with one's own pain then one respects the pain of others, and so, briefly, but transcendentally, we can release each other from pain.

James Baldwin
And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time, and furthermore, to win.

James Baldwin
I'm beginning to think that maybe everything that happens makes sense. Like, if it didn't make sense, how could it happen?

James Baldwin
All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it.

James Baldwin
This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.

James Baldwin
When the Negro hates the Jew as a Jew he does so partly because the nation does and in much the same painful fashion that he hates himself. It is an aspect of his humiliation, whittled down to a manageable size and then transferred; it is the best form the Negro has for tabulating vocally his long record of grievances against his native land.

James Baldwin
A civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.

James Baldwin
At bottom, to be colored means that one has been caught in some utterly unbelievable cosmic joke, a joke so hideous and in such bad taste that it defeats all categories and definitions.

James Baldwin
My face is like a face you have seen many times.

James Baldwin
You don't need numbers; you need passion, and this is proven by the history of the world!

James Baldwin
There is no way of conveying to the corpse the reasons you have made him one--you have the corpse, and you are, thereafter, at themercy of a fact which missed the truth, which means that the corpse has you.

James Baldwin
I do not wish to see Negroes become the equal of their murderers. I wish us to become equal to ourselves. To become a people so free in themselves that they will have no need to—fear— others—and have no need to murder others.

James Baldwin
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 marks 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. On this acceptance, literally, the life of a writer depends.

James Baldwin
It is said that the camera cannot lie, but rarely do we allow it to do anything else, since the camera sees what you point it at: the camera sees what you want it to see.

James Baldwin
It seems to be typical of life in America... that the second generation has no time to talk to the first.

James Baldwin
The interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world.

James Baldwin
You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.

James Baldwin
The price the white American paid for his ticket was to become white—and, in the main, nothing more than that, or, as he was to insist, nothing less.

James Baldwin
Boy, ain't it time you was thinking about your soul?

James Baldwin
Such figures as Boy George do not disturb me nearly so much as do those relentlessly hetero (sexual?) keepers of the keys and seals, those who know what the world needs in the way of order and who are ready and willing to supply that order.

James Baldwin
Being in the pulpit, was like being in the theatre; I was behind the scenes and knew how the illusion worked.

James Baldwin
If you think too far ahead, if you even try to think too far ahead, you'll never make it.

James Baldwin
Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the battle field.

James Baldwin
Our passion for categorization, life neatly fitted into pegs, has led to an unforeseen, paradoxical distress, confusion, a breakdown of meaning.

James Baldwin
Our crown has already been bought and paid for. All we have to do is wear it.

James Baldwin
After my best friend jumped off the bridge, I knew that I was next. So-Paris. With forty dollars and a one-way ticket.

James Baldwin
If you really want to know something about solitude, become famous.

James Baldwin
European society has always been divided into classes in a way that American society never has been. A European writer considers himself to be part of an old and honorable tradition--of intellectual activity, of letters--and his choice of a vocation does not cause him any uneasy wonder as to whether or not it will cost him all his friends. But this tradition does not exist in America.

James Baldwin
To defend oneself against a fear is simply to insure that one will, one day, be conquered by it; fears must be faced.

James Baldwin
When you're writing, you're trying to find out something which you don't know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don't want to know, what you don't want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.

James Baldwin