Quotes from James Baldwin

I looked around the subway car. It was a little like the drawings I had seen of slave ships. Of course, they hadn't had newspapers on the slave ships, hadn't needed them yet; but, as concerned space (and also, perhaps, as concerned intention) the principle was exactly the same.

all the fears with which I had grown up, and which were now a part of me and controlled my vision of the world, rose up like a wall between the world and me...

Take no one's word for anything, including mine—but trust your experience.

this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them...

He was sobbing, it would have been said, as though his heart would break.

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

But people can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.

It is not too much to say that whoever wishes to become a truly moral human being– and let us not ask whether or not this is possible, I think we must believe that it is possible– must first divorce himself from all the prohibitions, crimes, and hypocrisies of the Christian church. 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.

dreamed of the touch of hands, of Giovanni's hands, or anybody's hands, hands which would have the power to crush me and make me whole again.

If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.

Perhaps he is a fool and a coward but almost everybody is one of the other and most people are both.

It is the responsibility of free men to trust and to celebrate what is constant—birth, struggle, and death are constant, and so is love, though we may not always think so—and to apprehend the nature of change, to be able and willing to change. I speak of change not on the surface but in the depths—change in the sense of renewal. But renewal becomes impossible if one supposes things to be constant that are not—safety, for example, or money, or power.

the sorrow of the disconnected.

It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death—ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us.

Love him, said Jacques, with vehemence, love him and let him love you

He stared in a dull paralysis of terror at the body of Elisha. He saw him standing - had Elisha forgotten? - beside Ella Mae before the altar while Father James rebuked him for the evil that lived in the flesh. He looked into Elisha's face, full of questions he would never ask. And Elisha's face told him nothing.

those innocents who believed that your imprisonment made them safe are losing their grasp of reality. But these men are your brothers—your lost, younger brothers. And if the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.

The time has come, God knows, for us to examine ourselves, but we can only do this if we are willing to free ourselves of the myth of America and try to find out what is really happening here.

But, you can't just go on being a brick stonewall forever.' 'I don't see why not,' she said. 'Nor do I see how not.

I was introduced, they greeted me with a genuine cordiality and respect - and the respect increased my fright, for it meant that they expected something of me, that I knew in my heart, for their sakes, I could not give - and we sat down.

C'est leur innocence qui constitue leur crime

she was disquietingly fluid — fluid, without, however, being able to flow.

I realized that the Bible had been written by white men. I knew that, according to many Christians, I was a descendant of Ham, who had been cursed, and that I was therefore predestined to be a slave.

Sometimes I think I'll just give up. But – how do you give up?