Quotes from James Baldwin

Something touched his imagination for a moment, suggesting that Leona was a person and had her story and that all stories were trouble.

But you can make your time together anything but dirty, you can give each other something which will make both of you better—forever—if you will not be ashamed, if you will only not play it safe.

He had often thought of his loneliness, for example, as a condition which testified to his superiority.

they reassured everyone that nothing terrible was happening

And I also felt, standing so close to him, feeling such a passion to keep him from terror, that a decision—once again!—had been taken from my hands. For neither my father nor Hella was real at that moment. And yet even 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.

in our time, as in every time, the impossible is the least that one can demand

And no matter what I was doing, another me sat in my belly, absolutely cold with terror over the question of my life.

For a woman,' she said, 'I think a man is always a stranger. And there's something awful about being at the mercy of a stranger.

The people who run the mass media and those who consume it are really in the same boat. They must continue to produce things they do not really admire, still less love, in order to continue buying things they do not really want, still less need. If we were dealing only with fintails, two-tone cars, or programs like Gunsmoke, the situation would not be so grave. The trouble is that serious things are handled (and received) with the same essential lack of seriousness.

Yet, hope—the hope that we, human beings, can be better than we are—dies hard; perhaps one can no longer live if one allows that hope to die. But it is also hard to see what one sees. One sees that most human beings are wretched, and, in one way or another, become wicked: because they are so wretched.

Negro actress once observed to me, that not only does the white world impose the most intolerable conditions on Negro life, they also presume to dictate the mode, manner, terms, and style of one's reaction against these conditions.

Now—now, of course, I see something very beautiful in those days, which were such torture then. I felt, then, that Giovanni was dragging me with him to the bottom of the sea.

I wanted to do something to his cheerful, hideous, worldly face which would make it impossible for him ever again to smile at anyone the way he was smiling at me.

I must—to be honest—add that my ministry almost certainly helped me through my adolescence by giving me something larger than myself to be frightened about.

He could not endure being very far from me for very long. I was the only person on God's cold, green earth who cared about him, who knew his speech and silence, knew his arms, and did not carry a knife.

p. 92) I know my robe's going to fit me well. I tried it on at the gates of Hell.

I dropped my brick and went to him. In a moment I heard his fall. And at moments like this I felt that we were merely enduring and committing the longer and lesser and more perpetual murder.

Não entendo por que o mundo é tão novo para os americanos", observou Giovanni. "Afinal, vocês todos são só imigrantes. E não saíram da Europa há tanto tempo assim.

The effort not to know what one knows is the most corrupting effort one can make—

Se você ficar se protegendo o tempo todo", acrescentou, mudando o tom de voz, "vai acabar preso dentro do seu próprio corpo sujo, pra sempre, pra todo o sempre — como eu.

what was the point, the purpose, of my salvation if it did not permit me to behave with love toward others, no matter how they behaved toward me?

I don't believe there's a white man in this country, baby, who can even get his dick hard, without he hear some nigger moan.

He wanted to be master, to speak with authority which could only come from God. it was later to become his proud testimony that he hated his sins - even as he ran towards sin, even as he sinned. He hated the evil that lived in his body, and he feared it, as he feared and hated the lions of lust and longing that prowled the defenseless city of his mind.

Man, Fonny says, we just have to move it from day to day. If you think too much about it, you really are fucked, can't move at all.