James Baldwin Quotes

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“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.”

“People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception.”

“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.”

“But, when the chips are down, its better to be furious with someone you love, or frightened for someone you love, than be put through the merciless horror of being ashamed of someone you love.”

“American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.”

“Those kids aren't dumb. But the people who run these schools want to make sure they don't get smart: they are really teaching the kids to be slaves.”

“I prefer sinners and madmen, who can learn, who can change, who can teach-or people like myself, if I may say so, who are not afraid to eat a lobster alone as they take on their shoulders the monumental weight of thirty years”

“The subtle and deadly change of heart that might occur in you would be involved with the realization that a civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.”

“To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to bein all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.”

“Freaks are called freaks and are treated as they are treated – in the main, abominably – because they are human beings who cause to echo, deep within us, our most profound terrors and desires.”

“For nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.”

“Allegiance, after all, has to work two ways; and one can grow weary of an allegiance which is not reciprocal.”

“If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.”

“With everything in me screaming No! yet the sum of me sighed Yes.”

“Yr crown has been bought and paid for. All you have to do is put it on yr head”

“There are people in the world for whom "coming along" is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.”

“People who cling to their illusions find it difficult, if not impossible, to learn anything worth learning: a people under the necessity of creating themselves must examine everything, and soak up learning the way the roots of a tree soak up water.”

“Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent”

“The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.”

“People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.”

“For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for whatthey become.”

“The American ideal is, after all, that everyone should be as much alike as possible.”

“There is a fearful splendor in absolute desolation.”

“The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.”