Quotes from James Baldwin

I don't think that the Negro problem in America can be even discussed coherently without bearing in mind its context; its context being the history, traditions, customs, the moral assumptions and preoccupations of the country; in short, the general social fabric. Appearances to the contrary, no one in America escapes its effects and everyone in America bears some responsibility for it.

I guess it takes a holy man to make a girl a real whore.

It's the only light we've got in all this darkness

He made me think of home—perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.

The black man in our midst carried murder in his heart, he wanted vengeance. We carried murder too, we wanted peace.

In those days my mother was given to the exasperating and mysterious habit of having babies.

He was one of those people who, quick to laugh, are slow to anger; so that their anger, when it comes, is all the more impressive, seeming to leap from some unsuspected crevice like a fire which will bring the whole house down.

A child cannot, thank Heaven, know how vast and how merciless is the nature of power, with what unbelievable cruelty people treat each other. He reacts to the fear in his parents' voices because his parents hold up the world for him and he has no protection without them.

At length, she lay beside him like a burden laid down at evening which must be picked up once more in the morning.

I did not know, however, that ancient glories imply, at least in the middle of the present century, present fatigue and, quite probably, paranoia; that there is a limit to the role of intelligence in human affairs; and that no people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.

These captive men are the hidden price for a hiden lie: the righteous must be able to locate the damned.

the righteous must be able to locate the damned.

The American Negro is a unique creation; he has no counterpart anywhere, and no predecessors.

It is quite possible to say that the price a Negro pays for becoming articulate is to find himself, at length, with nothing to be articulate about. (You taught me language, says Caliban to Prospero, and my profit on't is I know how to curse.)

From my own point of view, the fact of the Third Reich alone makes obsolete forever any question of Christian superiority, except in technological terms. White

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

Only a man can see in the face of a woman the girl she was. It is a secret which can be revealed only to a particular man, and, then, only at his insistence. But men have no secrets, except from women, and never grow up in the way that women do. It is very much harder, and it takes much longer, for a man to grow up, and he could never do it at all without women. This is a mystery which can terrify and immobilize a woman, and it is always the key to her deepest distress.

The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality - for this touchstone can be only oneself. Such a person interpose between himself and reality nothing less than a labyrinth of attitudes. And these attitudes, furthermore, though the person is usually unaware of it (is unaware of so much), are historical and public attitudes.

The root of the black man's hatred is rage, and he does not so much hate white men as simply wants them out of his way, and, more than that, out of his children's way.

I don't believe in this nonsense about time. Time is just common, it's like water for a fish. Everybody's in this water, nobody gets out of it, or if he does the same thing happens to him that happens to the fish, he dies. And you know what happens in this water, time? The big fish eat the little fish. That's all. The big fish eat the little fish and the ocean doesn't care.

There's no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it.

We are in the middle of an immense metamorphosis here, a metamorphosis which will, it is devoutly to be hoped, rob us of our myths and give us our history, which will destroy our attitudes and give us back our personalities. The mass culture, in the meantime, can only reflect our chaos: and perhaps we had better remember that this chaos contains life—and a great transforming energy.

Here was the South Side--a million in captivity--stretching from this doorstep as far as the eye could see. And they didn't even read; depressed populations don't have the time or energy to spare. The affluent populations, which should have their help, didn't as far as could be discovered, read, either--they merely bought books and devoured them, but not in order to learn: in order to learn new attitudes.

There appears to be a vast amount of confusion on this point, but I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be "accepted" by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don't wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet.