It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.
JAMES BALDWINIf 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
More James Baldwin Quotes
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You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
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The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world’s definitions.
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 -
Literature is indispensable to the world.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Our crown has already been bought and paid for. All we have to do is wear it.
JAMES BALDWIN -
There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.
JAMES BALDWIN -
If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark.
JAMES BALDWIN -
All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique.
JAMES BALDWIN -
There are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have.
JAMES BALDWIN