James Baldwin: Trending quotes (page 5)

“No man is a devil in his own mind.”

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive.”

“You know, it's not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.”

“If you cannot love me, I will die. 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.”

“I often wonder what I'd do if there weren't any books in the world.”

“People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.”

“Somebody," said Jacques, "your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour - and in the oddest places! - for the lack of it.”

“how can one respect, let alone adopt, the values of a people who do not, on any level whatever, live the way they say they do, or the way they say they should?”

“Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.”

“There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves. People are not, for example, terribly anxious to be equal (equal, after all, to what and to whom?) but they love the idea of being superior.”

“Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?”

“Whatever you describe to another person is also a revelation of who you are and who you think you are. You can not describe anything without betraying your point of view, your aspirations, your fears, your hopes. Everything.”

“Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.”

“The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.”

“When you're writing you're trying to find out something which you don't know.”

“The impossible is the least that one can demand.”

“History is not a procession of illustrious people. It's about what happens to a people. Millions of anonymous people is what history is about.”

“It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.”

“Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.”