James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room Quotes
There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.
You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.
People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.
Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore
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.
There are women who have forgotten that to be a woman doesn't simply mean humiliation, doesn't simply mean bitterness. I haven't forgotten it yet...I'm not going to forget it.
The world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.
This was not as real as my despairing sense that nothing was real for me, nothing would ever be real for me again – unless, indeed, this sensation of falling was reality…
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.
A real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things that can be named.
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.
