James Baldwin Quotes
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s a great city, Paris, a beautiful city––and––it was very good for me.
Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
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.
A civilization is not destroyed by wicked people it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.
I know that people can be better than they are. We are capable of bearing a great burden, once we discover that the burden is reality and arrive where reality is.
Anyway, I have long had a very definite tendency to tune out the moment I come anywhere near either a pulpit or a soapbox.
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.
This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.
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…
It does seem - well, difficult - to be at the mercy of some gross, unshaven stranger before you can begin to be yourself.
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.
It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Love forces, at last, this humility: you cannot love if you cannot be loved, you cannot see if you cannot be seen.
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.
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