Quotes from James Baldwin

Tell me', he said, 'what is this thing about time? Why is it better to be late than early? People are always saying, we must wait, we must wait. What are they waiting for? [...] 'I guess people wait in order to make sure of what they feel.' 'In order to make sure!' [...] 'And when you have waited - has it made you sure?

We will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, armies, flags, & nations; in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me one should rejoice in the fact of death, one out to decide indeed to earn ones death by confronting with passion, the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life. It is that small beacon from that terrifying darkness from wence we come and wence we shall return.

To accept one's past-- one's history--is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it.

Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford, and you are not that young any more.

I ached abruptly, intolerably, with a longing to go home; not that hotel, in one of the alleys of Paris, where the concierge barred the way with my unpaid bill; but home, home across the ocean, to things and people I knew and understood; to those things, those places, those people which I would always helplessly, and in whatever bitterness of spirit, love above all else.

The question is banal but one of the real troubles with living is that living is so banal.

What others did was their responsibility, for which they would answer when the judgment trumpet sounded. But what I did was my responsibility, and I would have to answer too

if one could read, in the dullness of his eye, anything so real as a future.

He lived, now, in time, with the roar and the stink and the beauty and the horror of innumerable men: he had been dropped onto this inferno in the twinkling of an eye.

A story is impelled by the necessity to reveal: the aim of the story is revelation, which means that a story can have nothing—at least not deliberately—to hide. This also means that a story resolves nothing. The resolution of a story must occur in us, with what we make of the questions with which the story leaves us. A plot, on the other hand, must come to a resolution, prove a point: a plot must answer all the questions which it pretends to pose.

We will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, armies, flags, & nations; in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me one should rejoice in the fact of death, one out to decide indeed to earn one's death by confronting with passion, the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life. It is that small beacon from that terrifying darkness from wence we come and wence we shall return.

He grinned. I could not tell whether he grinned because he thought I was lying or because he knew I was telling the truth.

For the crime of their ancestry, millions of people in the middle of the twentieth century, and in the heart of Europe—God's citadel—were sent to a death so calculated, so hideous, and so prolonged that no age before this enlightened one had been able to imagine it, much less achieve and record it.

I told myself all sorts of lies, standing there at the bar, but I could not move. And this was partly because I knew that it did not really matter anymore; it did not even matter if I never spoke to Giovanni again; for they had become visible, as visible as the wafers on the shirt of the flaming princess, they stormed all over me, my awakening, my insistent possibilities.

Fonny is working on the wood, on the stone, whistling, smiling. And, from far away, but coming nearer, the baby cries and cries and cries and cries and cries and cries and cries and cries, cries like it means to wake the dead.

But to try and find out what Americans mean is almost impossible because there are so many things they do not want to face.

Rufus thought, But it's not possible to forget anybody you were that hung up on, who was that hung up on you. You can't forget anything that hurt so badly, went so deep, and changed the world forever. It's not possible to forget anybody you've destroyed.

We're all bastards. That's why we need our friends.

I had one margarita, though we all knew it was against the goddamn motherfucking shiteating law, and Fonny had a whiskey because at 21 you have a legal right to drink.

I could not but feel, in those sorrowful years, that this human indifference, concerning which I knew so much already, would be my portion on the day that the United States decided to murder its Negroes systematically instead of little by little and catch-as-catch-can.

Women don't see men the way men want to be seen. They see all the tender places, all the places where they blood could flow.

Nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.

Somebody,' [...] should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour [...] for the lack of it.

One had to make one's way carefully here, for all these people were blind.