Quotes from James Baldwin

In benighted, incompetent Africa, I had never encountered an orphan: the American streets resembled nothing so much as one vast, howling, unprecedented orphanage. It has been vivid to me for many years that what we call a race problem here is not a race problem at all: to keep calling it that is a way of avoiding the problem. The problem is rooted in the question of how one treats one's flesh and blood, especially one's children.

It is the peculiar triumph of society—and its loss—that it is able to convince those people to whom it has given inferior status of the reality of this decree.

The greatest poet in the English language found his poetry where poetry is found: in the lives of the people. He could have done this only through love — by knowing … that whatever was happening to anyone was happening to him

People who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are.

She danced out into the aisle, beautiful with a beauty unbearable, graceful with grace that poured from heaven.

You know and I know that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too early. We cannot be free until they are free.

TROUPE: Do you have any feelings about yuppies? BALDWIN: I saw them coming. I knew them. They can't, I'm afraid, be taught anything.

The author must rob us of our myths, and give us our history, which will destroy our attitudes and give us back or personalities.

How strange and beautiful—it must be one of the few real reasons for remaining alive, of desiring to—to dance with your daughter, your son, and your wife; touching, really digging it, laughing, and keeping the beat, free

I have more faith in Southerners than I will ever have in Northerners: the mighty and pious North could never, after all, have acquired its wealth without utilizing, brutally and consciously, those "folk" ways, and locking the South within them. And when this country's absolutely inescapable disaster levels it, it is in the South and not in the North that the rebirth will begin.

White people invented black people to give white people identity…straight cats invented faggots so they can sleep with them without becoming faggots themselves. James Baldwin and Nikke Giovanni (1993)

Love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time, and, furthermore, win.

It's funny what you hold on to to get through terror when terror surrounds you.

Her voice reminded me for a minute of what heroin feels like sometimes—when it's in your veins.

A man grows up when he looks back, realizes what has happened to him, accepts it all, and begins to change himself. He cannot grow up until he reaches this moment and passes it. We are now at the end of our extraordinarily prolonged adolescence. A very great poet, an American, Miss Marianne Moore, wrote, many years ago, the following description of our terrors: The weak overcomes its menace. The strong overcomes itself.

All you are ever told in this country about being black is that it is a terrible, terrible thing to be. Now, in order to survive this, you have to really dig down into yourself and re-create yourself, really, according to no image which yet exists in America. You have to impose, in fact—this may sound very strange—you have to decide who you are, and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.

You go to white movies and, like everybody else, you fall in love with Joan Crawford, and you root for the Good Guys who are killing off the Indians. It comes as a great psychological collision when you realize all of these things are really metaphors for your oppression, and will lead into a kind of psychological warfare in which you may perish

Books taught me that the things that tormented me were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive. – James Baldwin, born on this day in 1924

It is one thing to demand justice in literature, and another thing to face the price that one has got to pay for it in life.

The root of the white man's hatred is terror, a bottomless and nameless terror, which focuses on the black, surfacing, and concentrating on this dread figure, an entity which lives only in his mind. But the root of the black man's hatred is rage, and he does not so much hate white men as simply want them out of his way, and, more than that, out of his children's way. When

If they come for you in the morning, they'll be coming for us that night.

Artists are here to disturb the peace...

To be African American is to be African without any memory and American without any privilege.

With my hand on the knob, I looked at him. Then I wanted to beg him to forgive me. But this would have been too great a confession; any yielding in that moment would have locked me forever in that room with him. And in a way this was exactly what I wanted. I felt a tremor go through me, like the beginnings of an earthquake, and felt, for an instant, that I was drowning in his eyes.