Quotes from James Baldwin

I am saying that a journey is called that because you cannot know what you will discover on the journey, what you will do with what you find, or what you find will do to you.

The romance of treason never occurred to us for the brutally simple reason that you can't betray a country you don't have. (Think about it).

It is not simply the relationship of oppressed to oppressor, of master to slave, nor is it motivated merely by hatred; it is also, literally and morally, a blood relationship, perhaps the most profound reality of the American experience, and we cannot begin to unlock it until we accept how very much it contains of the force and anguish and terror of love.

She thought of herself as his strength; in a world of shadows, the indisputable reality to which he could always repair. And, again, for all that had come, she could not regret this. She had tried, but she had never been and was not now, even tonight, truly sorry. Where, then, was her repentance? And how could God hear her cry?

One writes out of one thing only—one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art. The

But white Americans do not believe in death, and this is why the darkness of my skin so intimidates them.

Ah! she said, men may be at the mercy of women?I think men like that idea, it strokes the misogynist in them. But if a particular man is ever at the mercy of a particular woman ?why, he's somehow stopped being a man.

You are afraid that you have been here with me too long, and are not really white anymore. That's probably true, but you were never really white in the first place. Nobody is. Nobody has, even, ever wanted to be white, unless they are afraid of being black. But being black is nothing to be afraid of. I knew that before I met you, and I have learned it again, through you. Perhaps being white is not a conceivable condition, but a terrifying fantasy, a moral choice.

Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

I suppose this to mean that the song is still needed, still has work to do.

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. I

She smiled. I been thinking, she said, how you better commence to tremble when the Lord, He gives you your heart's desire.

But what I mean about being a woman is, we might get married now and stay married for fifty years and I might be a stranger to you every instant of that time and you might never know it.

How can one... dream of power in any other terms than in the symbols of power?

The man does not remember the hand that struck him, the darkness that frightened him, as a child; nevertheless, the hand and darkness remain with him, indivisible from himself forever, part of the passion that drives him wherever he thinks to take flight.

For the first time in her life she hated it all. The white city. The white world. She could not that day think of one decent white person in the whole world. She sat there and she hoped that one day God with tortures inconceivable would grind them utterly into humility and make them know that black boys and black girls whom they treated with such condescension, such distain and such good humor had hearts like human beings too, More human hearts than theirs.

If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him. I

But I knew , she said, I knew. This is what makes me so ashamed. I knew it every time you looked at me. I knew it every time we went to bed. If only you had told me the truth then. Don't you see how unjust it was to wait for me to find it out? To put all the burden on me ? I had the right to expect to hear from you?women are always waiting for the man to speak. Or hadn't you heard?

I knew the tension in me between love and power, between pain and rage, and the curious, the grinding way I remained extended between these poles—perpetually attempting to choose the better rather than the worse.

We are in a rough situation—but, if you really want to think about it, ain't nothing new about that. That's just exactly, daughter, when you do not give up. You can't give up.

Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise.

From my chair, I looked out my window, over these dreadful streets. The baby asked, 'Is there not one righteous among them?

tenderness so painful I thought my heart would burst.

It's very hard to live with that," said Eric. "I mean, with the sense that one is never what one seems — never — and yet, what one seems to be is probably, in some sense, almost exactly what one is.