Quotes from James Baldwin

There is nothing more boring, anyway, than sexual activity as an end in itself, and a great many people who came out of the closet should reconsider.

Out of joy strength came, strength that was fashioned to bear sorrow: sorrow brought forth joy. Forever? This was Ezekiel's wheel, in the middle of the burning air forever -- and the little wheel ran by faith, and the big wheel ran by the grace of God.

If one can live with one's own pain then one respects the pain of others, and so, briefly, but transcendentally, we can release each other from pain.

Uncle Tom's Cabin, then, is activated by what might be called a theological terror, the terror of damnation; and the spirit that breathes in this book, hot, self-righteous, fearful, is not different from that spirit of medieval times which sought to exorcize evil by burning witches; and is not different from that terror which activates a lynch mob.

I scarcely know how to describe that room. It became, in a way, every room I had ever been in and every room I find myself in hereafter will remind me of Giovanni's room.

The paradox, and a fearful paradox it is, is that the American Negro can have no future anywhere on any continent as long as he is unwilling to accept his past. To accept one's past--one's history--is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.

O riso e o amor vêm do mesmo lugar: mas pouca gente vai lá.

In the culture to be born there will no doubt be old and new elements. How these elements will be mixed is not a question to which any individual can respond. The response must be given by the community. But we can say this: that the response will be given, and not verbally, but in tangible facts, and by action.

I saw myself, sharply, as a wanderer, an adventurer, rocking through the world, unanchored.

It is axiomatic that the Negro is religious, which is to say that he stands in fear of the God our ancestors gave us and before whom we all tremble yet. There are probably more churches in Harlem than in any other ghetto in this city and they are going full blast every night and some of them are filled with praying people every day. This, supposedly, exemplifies the Negro's essential simplicity and good-will; but it is actually a fairly desperate emotional business.

To accept one's past—one's history—is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.

he died because, at the bottom of his heart, he really believed what white people said about him. This is one of the reasons that he became so holy.

It does seem - well, difficult - to be at the mercy of some gross, unshaven stranger before you can begin to be yourself.

EVERYONE HAD ALWAYS said that John would be a preacher when he grew up, just like his father. It had been said so often that John, without ever thinking about it, had come to believe it himself. Not until the morning of his fourteenth birthday did he really begin to think about it, and by then it was already too late

I wish to God I may die if I don't love you. There ain't no sky above us if I don't love you

Thought the death took many forms, though people died early in many different ways, the death itself was very simple and the cause was simple, too: as simple as the plague: the kids had been told that they weren't worth shit and everything they saw around them proved it. They struggled, they struggled, but they fell, like flies, and they congregated on the garbage heaps of their lives like flies.

It was the Lord who knew of the impossibility every parent in that room faced: how to prepare the child for the day when the child would be despised and how to create in the child - by what means? - a stronger antidote to this poison than one had found for oneself.

It is louder than an untrained orchestra in rehearsal and the sound of infants and children is the theme: tremendously developed, in extraordinary harmonies, in the voices of the elders.

Negroes know how little most white people are prepared to implement their words with deeds, how little, when the chips are down, they are prepared to risk. And this long history of moral evasion has had an unhealthy effect on the total life of the country, and has eroded whatever respect Negroes may once have felt for white people.

In Africa, he said, there was none whatever. Africans do not, in fact, believe that Christianity is any longer real for Europeans, due to the immense scaffolding with which they have covered it, and the fact that this religion has no effect whatever on their conduct.

But she saw nothing in my eyes—she stared at me as though I had made a long journey on a white charger all the way to her prison house.

To 'come along' meant that he would change his ways and consent to be the husband she had traveled so far to find. It was he who, unforgivably, taught her that there are people in the world for whom 'coming along' is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.

They knew his taxi better than they knew him, if you see what I mean. People always know the outside better than they know the inside.

Nothing ever goes away