J.F. Baldwin Quotes
It is hard for anyone under twenty to realise that death has already assigned them a number, which is going to come up one day.
What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one's heroic ancestors.
It is astonishing that in a country so devoted to the individual, so many people should be afraid to speak.
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.
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.
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.
When the book comes out it may hurt you - but in order for me to do it, it had to hurt me first. I can only tell you about yourself as much as I can face about myself.
Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.
After my best friend jumped off the bridge, I knew that I was next. So-Paris. With forty dollars and a one-way ticket.
The betrayal of a belief is not the same thing as ceasing to believe. If this were not so there would be no moral standards in the world at all.
The male cannot bear very much humiliation; and he really cannot bear it, it obliterates him.
I really do believe in the New Jerusalem. I really do believe that we can all become better than we are. I know we can. But the price is enormous and people are not yet willing to pay it.
The world tends to trap you in the role you play and it is always extremely hard to maintain a watchful, mocking distance between oneself as one appears to be and oneself as one actually is.
In order for this to happen, your entire frame of reference will have to change, and you will be forced to surrender many things that you now scarcely know you have.
The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through.
If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, fire next time.
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.
I am certainly convinced that it is one of the greatest impulses of mankind to arrive at something higher than a natural state.
An American Negro, however deep his sympathies, or however bright his rage, ceases to be simply a black man when he faces a black man from Africa.
To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity.
It seems to be typical of life in America ... that the second generation has no time to talk to the first.
You're getting to be a big boy,' I said desperately, 'it's time you started thinking about your future.' 'I'm thinking about my future,' said Sonny, grimly. 'I think about it all the time.
I'm beginning to think that maybe everything that happens makes sense. Like, if it didn't make sense, how could it happen?
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 Joyce is right about history being a nightmare-- but it may be that nightmare from which no one can awaken. People are trapped in history and history in trapped in them.
People can cry much easier than they can change, a rule of psychology people like me picked up as kids on the street.
The determination to outwit one's situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.
In the invincible and indescribable squalor of Harlem ... I was tormented. I felt caged, like an animal. I wanted to escape. I felt if I did not get out I would slowly strangle.
Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always seem untimely.
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.
At four o'clock in the morning, when everyone is drunk enough, then extraordinary things can happen.
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?
I was guilty and irritated and full of love and pain. I wanted to kick him and I wanted to take him in my arms.
I think Americans are terrified of feeling anything. I never met a people more infantile in my life.
She was twenty and had come to realize that, though she had a voice, she wasn't a singer; that to endure and embrace the life of a singer demands a whole lot more than a voice.
It was as though we were a picture, trapped in time: this had been happening for hundreds of years, people sitting in a room, waiting for dinner, and listening to the blues.
A devotion to humanity is... too easily equated with a devotion to a Cause, and Causes, as we know, are notoriously bloodthirsty.
My friend was about to introduce me when she looked at me and smiled and said, "Whose little boy are you?"
