There are people in the world for whom “coming along” is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.
JAMES BALDWINWhen you’re writing you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know.
More James Baldwin Quotes
-
-
Those kids aren’t dumb. But the people who run these schools want to make sure they don’t get smart: they are really teaching the kids to be slaves.
JAMES BALDWIN -
The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way a person looks at reality, then you can change it.
JAMES BALDWIN -
American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Whoever debases others is debasing himself.
JAMES BALDWIN -
People can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.
JAMES BALDWIN -
We all commit our crimes. The thing is to not lie about them.
JAMES BALDWIN -
For nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.
JAMES BALDWIN -
There is a fearful splendor in absolute desolation.
JAMES BALDWIN -
No one is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart: for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
JAMES BALDWIN -
People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.
JAMES BALDWIN -
To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.
JAMES BALDWIN -
To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.
JAMES BALDWIN -
I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.
JAMES BALDWIN -
People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.
JAMES BALDWIN -
The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat.
JAMES BALDWIN -
It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
JAMES BALDWIN -
The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.
JAMES BALDWIN -
All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Youth must be the worst time in anybody’s life.
JAMES BALDWIN -
If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.
JAMES BALDWIN -
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
JAMES BALDWIN