Quotes from James Baldwin

To find out, to find out, you keep saying, as though we were accomplices in a crime. We have not committed any crime.

That the world calls morality is nothing but the dream of safety. That's how the world gets to be so fucking moral. The only way to know that you are safe is to see somebody else in danger-otherwise you can't be sure if you're safe.

In order to change a situation one has first to see it for what it is.

To be loved, baby, hard, at once, and forever, to strengthen you against the loveless world. Remember that: I know how black it looks today, for you.

I could not stop talking, though I feared at every instant that I would say too much. Perhaps I wanted to say too much.

I looked out of the window and the streets rolled by. Ages ago, in another city, on another bus, I sat so at the windows, looking outward, inventing for each flying face which trapped my brief attention some life, some destiny, in which I played a part. I was looking for some whisper, or promise, of my possible salvation. But it seemed to me that morning that my ancient self had been dreaming the most dangerous dream of all.

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.

Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one's sense of one's own reality.

That all men were like this, their thoughts rose no higher, and they lived only to gratify on the bodies of women their brutal and humiliating needs.

Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without, but know we cannot live within. I use the word love here, not merely in the personal sense--but as a state of being, or a state of grace. Not in the infantile American sense of being made happy, but in the tough and universal sense of quest, and daring, and growth

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. How can the American Negro's past be used? The unprecedented price demanded—and at this embattled hour of the world's history—is the transcendence of the realities of color, of nations, and of altars.

When I watched all the children, their copper, brown, and beige faces staring up at me as I taught Sunday school, I felt that I was committing a crime in talking about the gentle Jesus, in telling them to reconcile themselves to their misery on earth in order to gain the crown of eternal life.

America has never wanted its Negroes to be men, and does not, generally, treat them as men. It treats them as mascots, pets, or things. Every Negro woman knows what her man faces when he goes out to work, and what poison he will probably bring back.

Beneath these faces, these clothes, accents, rudeness, was power and sorrow, both unadmitted, unrealized, the power of inventors, the sorrow of the disconnected.

The power to define the other seals one's definition of oneself.

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.

As the years passed, she replied only: I'm going away from here. And it hung, this determination, like a heavy jewel between her breasts; it was written in fire on the dark sky of her mind.

Our power and our fear of change help bind these people to their misery and bewilderment, and insofar as they find this state intolerable we are intolerably menaced.

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.

He did not wonder. He had once told Esther that if the Lord ever gave him a son he would call him Royal, because the line of the faithful was a royal line — his son would be a royal child. And this she had remembered as she thrust him from her; with what had perhaps been her last breath she had mocked him and his father with this name. She had died, then, hating him; she had carried into eternity a curse on him and his.

You play it safe long enough," he said, in a different tone, "and you'll end up trapped in your own dirty body, forever and forever and forever—like me.

You mean I have a home to go to as long as I don't go there?" He laughed. "Well, isn't it true? You don't have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back." "I seem," I said, "to have heard this song before." "Ah, yes," said Giovanni, "and you will certainly hear it again. It is one of those songs that somebody somewhere will always be singing.

His own condition is overwhelming proof that white people do not live by these standards. Negro servants have been smuggling odds and ends out of white homes for generations, and white people have been delighted to have them do it, because it has assuaged a dim guilt and testified to the intrinsic superiority of white people.

You said once, he said, that you wanted to grow. Isn't that always frightening? Doesn't it always hurt?