Quotes from James Baldwin

Mas não é isso mesmo? Você só passa a ter uma casa quando vai embora dela, e depois, quando foi embora, você nunca mais pode voltar.

If the hope of giving is to love the living, the giver risks madness in the act of giving.

p.92) I felt very close to him, and really wished to be able to love and honor him as a witness, an ally, and a father. I felt that I knew something of his pain and fury, and, yes even his beauty. Yet precisely because of the reality and the nature of those streets - because of what he conceived as his responsibility and what I took to be min - we would always be strangers, and possibly one day, enemies.

Americans suffer from an ignorance that is not only colossal, but sacred.

Zaman krall?klara yetiÅŸir ve onlar? yerle bir eder, diÅŸlerini doktrinlere geçirerek onlar? parçalar; zaman krall?klar?n üzerine oturduÄŸu kurumlar? aç??a ç?kar?r ve o kurumlar? yer, yanl?? olduklar?n? kan?tlayarak doktrinleri yok eder.

I'm still learning how to write. I don't know what technique is." —

It I'd galling indeed to have stood so long, hat in hand, waiting for Americans to grow up enough to realize that you do not threaten them. (From The Fure Next Time)

Art is] very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important.

Write. Find a way to keep alive and write. There is nothing else to say. If you are going to be a writer there is nothing I can say to stop you; if you're not going to be a writer nothing I can say will help you. What you really need at the beginning is somebody to let you know that the effort is real.

you have to decide who you are, and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.

I would not allow myself to be defined by other people, white or black." —James Baldwin

so could not have had first-hand knowledge of how gleefully a policeman translates his orders from above. But they had no right not to know that; if they did not know that, they knew nothing and had no right to speak as though they were responsible actors in their society; for their complicity with the patriots of that hour meant that the policeman was acting on their orders, too.

It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I'd been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as thought I had a right to be here.

I cannot depend upon the American moral credit to save some of the people that I love.

I don't, now, know what I expected of fame, but I suppose it never occurred to me that the light could be just as dangerous, just as killing, as the dark.

It I'd galling indeed to have stood so long, hat in hand, waiting for Americans to grow up enough to realize that you do not threaten them. (from The Fire Next Time)

No man can say whether you are happy or not until you die, for no man knows misfortunes may overtake you or what misery may be yours in place of all this slendor.

It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I'd been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.

Now, it is true that the nature of society is to create, among its citizens, an illusion of safety; but it is also absolutely true that the safety is always necessarily an illusion. Artists are here to disturb the peace.

What is it you wanted me to reconcile myself to? I was born here almost 60 years ago, I'm not gonna live another 60 years. You always told me it takes time. It's taken my father's time, my mother's time. My uncle's time. My brother's and my sister's time. My nieces' and my nephews' time. How much time do you want? For your progress.

At this point too, it may be suggested, the legend of Paris has done its deadly work, which is, perhaps, so to stun the traveler with freedom that he begins to long for the prison of home - home then becoming the place where questions are not asked.

ou think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read

But white people seem affronted by the black distrust of white policemen, and appear to be astonished that a black man, woman, or child can have any reason to fear a white cop.

For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock.