Quotes from James Baldwin

Then John knew that a curse was renewed from moment to moment, from father to son. Time was indifferent, like snow and ice; but the heart, crazed wanderer in the driving waste, carried the curse forever.

What a long way, I thought, I've come — to be destroyed!

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.

I'm going to pray God," said John—and his voice shook, whether with joy or grief he could not say—"to keep me, and make me strong ... to stand ... to stand against the enemy ... and against everything and everybody ... that wants to cut down my soul.

Whatever the Europeans may actually think of artists, they have killed enough of them off by now to know that they are as real-and as persistent- as rain, snow, taxes or businessmen.

There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.

Furthermore, those beneath the Western heel, unlike those within the West, are aware that Germany's current role in Europe is to act as a bulwark against the "uncivilized" hordes, and since power is what the powerless want, they understand very well what we of the West want to keep, and are not deluded by our talk of a freedom that we have never been willing to share with them.

America is God's gift to anybody—if it is, God's days have got to be numbered. That God these people say they serve—and do serve, in ways that they don't know—has got a very nasty sense of humor. Like you'd beat the shit out of Him, if He was a man. Or: if you were.

Maybe everything bad that happens to you makes you weaker,' said Giovanni, as though he had not heard me, 'and so you can stand less and less.

Then, we were still. We did not move, because we could not. We held each other so close that we might indeed have been one body.

You do, sometimes, remind of the kind of man who is tempted to put himself in prison in order to avoid being hit by a car.

We human beings now have the power to exterminate ourselves; this seems to be the entire sum of our achievement.

Quelqu'un, dit Jacques, mon père ou le tien, aurait dû nous dire que peu de gens sont jamais morts d'amour. Mais combien ont péri, et continuent à périr à toute heure, et dans les endroits les plus étranges ! par manque d'amour.

No,' he said, frankly, 'I don't. I don't believe all this female intuition shit. It's something women have dreamed up.' 'You can say that--and in such a tone!' she mimicked him: 'Something women have dreamed up. But I can't say that--what men have 'dreamed up' is all there is, the world they've dreamed up is the world.

I have not thought of that boy—Joey—for many years; but I see him quite clearly tonight. It was several years ago. I was still in my teens, he was about my age, give or take a year. He was a very nice boy, too, very quick and dark, and always laughing. For a while he was my best friend. Later, the idea that such a person could have been my best friend was proof of some horrifying taint in me. So I forgot him. But I see him very well tonight.

I felt in her marvellously living body the possibility of legitimate surrender.

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. One

To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case, the danger, in the minds of most white Americans, is the loss of their identity. Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shining and all the stars aflame.

I walked over to her and put my head on her breast. I wanted to lie there, hidden and still.

You've come full circle. Here you are again, with it all to do all over again, and you must decide all over again whether you want to be famous or whether you want to write. And the two things, in spite of all the evidence, have nothing whatever in common.

many of them indeed know better. But as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.

It is not permissible that the authors of devastation should be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.

Judgment," she said, "has nothing to do with love.

Well,' she said, 'you may not be a stranger now. But you were once and I'm sure you will be again — many times.