Quotes About James Baldwin

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.

Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a sense of life's possibilities.

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

And in Uncle Tom's Cabin we may find foreshadowing of both: the formula created by the necessity to find a lie more palatable than the truth has been handed down and memorized and persists yet with a terrible power.

When white supremacy becomes institutional, it begins to harm the very people who are not simply outside of it because of their race, it begins to harm the folk who look like the folk who want to be in charge. Martin Luther King, Jr., understood this, Malcolm X understood this, James Baldwin really understood this.

Don't even get me started on James Baldwin!" Esteban wailed. "The man . . . the prophet . . . the poet laureate who wrote the liturgy of his entire race, and his people won't celebrate his queer spirit!

My dream role is to portray someone like James Baldwin. I've always been a fan of his writing, and I feel like he's one of our unsung heroes. He's been pretty much forgotten, and I think he needs to be recognized. He had to go all the way to Europe to find recognition and acceptance, and I'd just like to bring him to the forefront.

She struggled to think of anyone besides perhaps James Baldwin and Jesus who had experiences the profound isolation and loenliness she now knew to be the one and only true reality of this world.