Quotes from James Baldwin

Somebody,' said Jacques, 'your father or mind, should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour —and in the oddest places!—for the lack of it

All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by drowning is all that awaits one there.

Crime became real, for example—for the first time—not as a possibility but as the possibility. One would never defeat one's circumstances by working and saving one's pennies; one would never, by working, acquire that many pennies, and, besides, the social treatment accorded even the most successful Negroes proved that one needed, in order to be free, something more than a bank account. One needed a handle, a lever, a means of inspiring fear.

When one begins to search for the crucial, the definitive moment, the moment which changed all others, one finds oneself pressing, in great pain, through a maze of false signals and abruptly locking doors.

white Americans have supposed "Europe" and "civilization" to be synonyms—which they are not—and have been distrustful of other standards and other sources of vitality, especially those produced in America itself, and have attempted to behave in all matters as though what was east for Europe was also east for them.

White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this—which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never—the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.

They had the judges, the juries, the shotguns, the law—in a word, power.

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

Every Negro boy—in my situation during those years, at least—who reaches this point realizes, at once, profoundly, because he wants to live, that he stands in great peril and must find, with speed, a "thing," a gimmick, to lift him out, to start him on his way. And it does not matter what the gimmick is.

One can be, indeed one must strive to become, tough and philosophical concerning destruction and death, for this is what most of mankind has been best at since we have heard of man. (But remember: most of mankind is not all of mankind.)

Whenever we ate breakfast, and wherever we walked, when we got home we were always too tired to sleep right away. We made coffee and sometimes drank cognac with it; we sat on the bed and talked and smoked.

But the Negro's experience of the white world cannot possibly create in him any respect for the standards by which the white world claims to live. His own condition is overwhelming proof that white people do not live by these standards.

I think it's very important for the male homosexual to recognize that he is a sexual target for other men, and that is why he is despised, and why he is called a faggot. He is called a faggot because other males need him.

Perhaps if you can accept the pain that almost kills you, you can use it, you can become better.

Non serve cercar di andare troppo a fondo in questo mistero che è tanto poco semplice quanto poco innocuo. Non sappiamo abbastanza di noi stessi. Credo sia meglio esser consci di non saperne niente, così si può crescere con il mistero e intanto il mistero cresce in te. Ma la giorno d'oggi, naturalmente, tutti sanno tutto ed è per questo che tanta gente si perde.

You don't know what he means by friendship but you have the feeling it may not be safe. You are afraid it may change you. What kind of friendship have you had?

It occurred to him that the question was not really what he was going to get but how he was to discover his possibilities and become reconciled to them.

I believe, that if we understood ourselves better, we would damage ourselves less.

Hence the question: Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?

I know that I was christened Clementine, and so it would make sense if people called me Clem, or even, come to think of it, Clementine, since that's my name: but they don't. People call me Tish.

White Americans find it as difficult as white people elsewhere do to divest themselves of the notion that they are in possession of some intrinsic value that black people need, or want.

We've got to be as clear-headed about human beings as possible, because we are still each other's only hope.

It is the Negro, of course, who is presumed to have become equal—an achievement that not only proves the comforting fact that perseverance has no color but also overwhelmingly corroborates the white man's sense of his own value. Alas, this value can scarcely be corroborated in any other way; there is certainly little enough in the white man's public or private life that one should desire to imitate.

the myth of the happy darky and Gone With the Wind. And the North Americans appear to believe these legends, which they have created and which absolutely nothing in reality corroborates, until today. And when these legends are attacked, as is happening now—all over a globe which has never been and never will be White—my countrymen become childishly vindictive and unutterably dangerous.