Quotes from James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room

Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.

You don't have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.

People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.

The real troubles with living is that living is so banal.

If you cannot love me, I will die. Before you came I wanted to die, I have told you many times. It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody.

That was how I met her, in a bar in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, she was drinking and watching, and that was why I liked her, I thought she would be fun to have fun with.

She fitted in my arms, she always had, and the shock of holding her caused me to feel that my arms had been empty since she had been away.

There are women who have forgotten that to be a woman doesn't simply mean humiliation, doesn't simply mean bitterness. I haven't forgotten it yet...I'm not going to forget it.