Literature is indispensable to the world.
JAMES BALDWINLiterature is indispensable to the world.
JAMES BALDWINThe 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 BALDWINGenerations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have.
JAMES BALDWINThe moment we cease to hold each other, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.
JAMES BALDWINYou think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
JAMES BALDWINNobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
JAMES BALDWINHatred is always self hatred, and there is something suicidal about it.
JAMES BALDWINPeople who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.
JAMES BALDWINThere is a fearful splendor in absolute desolation.
JAMES BALDWINConfusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore.
JAMES BALDWINLove was a country he knew nothing about.
JAMES BALDWINYou have to go the way your blood beats. If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live some other life, you won’t live any life at all.
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
JAMES BALDWINIt 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 BALDWINIt is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
JAMES BALDWINI am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also so much more than that. So are we all.
JAMES BALDWIN