J.F. Baldwin Quotes

If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go.

You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discovered it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky.

The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did--which was to hide.

My job as a writer is simple. Write a book I’m proud of, and present it as a gift to the world. Some will love it.Some will hate it.That’s the nature of art.

My job as a writer is simple.Write a book I’m proud of, and present it as a gift to the world.Some will love it.Some will hate it.That’s the nature of art.

He wanted to go home and lock his door and sleep. He was tired of the troubles of real people. He wanted to get back to the people he was inventing, whose troubles he could bear.

I don’t know any writers who don’t drink.

Do you know what it’s like to kill a man? You just pushed a knife into living, moving skin and you realize you pierced a heart that beats against your sharp knife.-Lucas Tyrel

Elisha, ' he said, 'no matter what happens to me, where I go, what folks say about me, no matter what anybody says, you remember - please remember - I was saved. I was there.

She fitted in my arms, she always had, and the shock of holding her caused me to feel that my arms had been empty since she had been away.

The question of identity is a question involving the most profound panic—a terror as primary as the nightmare of the mortal fall.

The first love disappears, but never goes. That ache becomes reconciliation.

Vaheguru, forgive me, but a woman must choose the wisdom of lies over the dangers of truth.

He wanted me to come home--to come home, as he said, and settle down, and whenever he said that I thought of the sediment at the bottom of a stagnant pond.

The ordinary stories of our ordinary lives have extraordinary gifts coded within them. . .

I wish I had heard him more clearly: an oblique confession is always a plea.

Steffi wasn't tired anymore. In fact, she felt invigorated. She was going to make it. She needed more of those kisses.

The last thing she remembered before finally drifting off was how nice Steffi's hair smelled.

There is never a time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment, the time is always now.

40Wednesday has been canceled due to a scheduling error.

We cannot escape our origins, however hard we try, those origins which contain the key -could we but find it- to all we later become

The closest I ever came to a near death experience was living in LA.

The way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people's pain.

All that hatred down there, " he said, "all that hatred and misery and love. It's a wonder it doesn't blow the avenue apart.

A real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things that can be named.

I saw the last piece of innocence unfurl inside of her.-Nick Plato (from the story Platonick)

You can have all the wine and dragons that my money can buy. That’s what the old woman told me, and I listened.

That was how I met her, in a bar in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, she was drinking and watching, and that was why I liked her, I thought she would be fun to have fun with.

I thought she would be fun to have fun with.

I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.

In my opinion any activity during which you can enjoy a beverage is not a sport. It is a party.

Remember: if you see something, say nothing, and drink to forget.

It’s nice to have a station pet. Wish it wasn’t trapped in a hovering prison in the men’s bathroom, but listen: no pet is perfect. It becomes perfect when you learn to accept it for what it is.

Terrifying, that the loss of intimacy with one person results in the freezing over of the world, and the loss of oneself.

Other people cannot see what I see whenever I look into your father's face, for behind your father's face as it is today are all those other faces which were his.

They knew that no one heard, that bloodless people cannot be made to bleed. So they blew what everyone had heard before, they reassured everyone that nothing terrible was happening.

When you're stuck in a spiral to change all aspects of the spin you need only to change one thing.

Change is the constant the signal for rebirth the egg of the phoenix.

Spiritual love is a position of standing with one hand extended into the universe and one hand extended into the world letting ourselves be a conduit for passing energy.

How we remember what we remember and why we remember form the most personal map of our individuality.

Character builds slowly but it can be torn down with incredible swiftness.

You cannot contribute anything to the ideal condition of mind and heart known as Brotherhood however much you preach posture or agree unless you live it.

With compassion we see benevolently our own human condition and the condition of our fellow beings. We drop prejudice. We withhold judgment.

What makes humility so desirable is the marvelous thing it does to us it creates in us a capacity for the closest possible intimacy with God.

They have rights who dare defend them.

Then comes Winston with his hundred horsepower mind and what can I do?

It’s a great city, Paris, a beautiful city––and––it was very good for me.

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

I want to be an inspirational model. I want people to look at me and say, 'Wow, she looks healthy.'

The wealthy don't have any sense of humor. It's not like the English, where the theater is perhaps the one place where they have a sense of humor about themselves.