James Baldwin: Trending quotes (page 4)

“Everybody's journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.”

“The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat.”

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

“People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.”

“It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.”

“Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity”

“People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state on innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.”

“For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness.”

“It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.”

“Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore”

“You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don't live the only life you have, you won't live some other life, you won't live any life at all.”

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

“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.”

“Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.”

“The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains.”

“Nakedness has no color: this can come as news only to those who have never covered, or been covered by, another naked human being.”

“Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.”

“The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.”

“If you're treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they're real for you whether they're real or not.”