Quotes from James Baldwin

She had known his father when lightning flashed and thunder rolled through Heaven, and his father said: 'Listen. God is talking.' She had known him in the mornings of that far-off country when his father turned on his bed and opened his eyes, and she had looked into those eyes, seeing what they held, and she had not been afraid.

What you think is going to happen?" "What we make happen," says Joseph—again, with resolution.

in America, by an emotional poverty so bottomless, and a terror of human life, of human touch, so deep, that virtually no American appears able to achieve any viable, organic connection between his public stance and his private life.

Whoever is born in New York is ill-equipped to deal with any other city: all other cities seem, at best, a mistake, and, at worst, a fraud.

An identity is questioned only when it is menaced, as when the mighty begin to fall, or when the wretched begin to rise, or when the stranger enters the gates, never, thereafter, to be a stranger: the stranger's presence making you the stranger, less to the stranger than to yourself.

The administration, increasingly, can rule only by fear: the fears of the people who elected them, and the fear that the administration can inspire.

My progress report concerning my journey to the palace of wisdom is discouraging.

You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don't live the life you have, you won't live some other life. You won't live any life at all.

We know, in the case of the person, that whoever cannot tell himself the truth about his past is trapped in it, is immobilized in the prison of his undiscovered self. This is also true of nations. We know how a person, in such a paralysis, in unable to assess either his weaknesses or his strengths, and how frequently indeed he mistakes one for the other.

It is the responsibility of free en 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.

To be androgynous, Webster's informs us, is to have both male and female characteristics. This means that there is a man in every woman, and a woman in every man. Sometimes this is recognised only when the chips are, brutally, down - when there is no longer any way to avoid this recognition. But love between a man and a woman, or love between any two human beings, would not be possible did we not have available to us the spiritual resources of both sexes.

When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.

And I also think, if you would steal from her, then of course you would lie to me, neither of us means anything to you; perhaps, in your eyes, we are simply luckier gangsters in a world which is run by gangsters.

Close up, you see the person's wrinkles, warts, and pimples; when close to you, the person has innumerable ways of driving you up the wall: but when far from you, these very same imperfections become irreplaceable and beautiful, testifying, after all, to how much each cared about the other. Close up, the person's imperfections matter, but from far away, you see your own. The questions then is not How did I stand her? but How did she stand me?

We know, in the case of the person, that whoever cannot tell himself the truth about his past is trapped in it, is immobilized in the prison of his undiscovered self. This is also true of nations. We know how a person, in such a paralysis, is unable to assess either his weaknesses or his strengths, and how frequently indeed he mistakes one for the other.

When two people have so much to say to each other that there's almost nothing they can say, and they just stare at each other. But that's saying something, too.

A child is too self-centered to relate to any dilemma that does not, somehow relate to him.

as the singing filled the air the watching, listening faces underwent a change, the eyes focusing on something within; the music seemed to soothe a poison out of them; and time seemed, nearly, to fall away from the sullen, belligerent, battered faces, as though they were fleeing back to their first condition, while dreaming of their last.

Nobody, no man and no woman, is precisely what they think they are. Love is where you find it. You don't know where it'll carry you, and it's a terrifying thing, love. It's the only possibility but it's terrifying.

Real questions can be absurdly phrased, and probably can be answered only by the questioner, and, at that, only in time. But real questions, especially from the young, are very moving and I will always remember the faces of some of those children.

The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don't see." ? James Baldwin

I had first been in San Francisco at the height of the civil rights movement, first on an Esquire junket, then on a lecture tour. There had been no flower children here then, only earnest, eager students anxious to know what they could "do.

she seemed to be wearing the sunlight, rearranging it around her from time to time, with a movement of one hand, with a movement of her head, and with her smile—

We no longer talked about our love affairs, for either they had failed, were failing, or were serious. Above all they were private—how can love be talked about? It is probably the most awful of all the revelations this little life affords.