It’s a miracle to realize that somebody loves you.
JAMES BALDWINIt’s a miracle to realize that somebody loves you.
JAMES BALDWINThere are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.
JAMES BALDWINThe price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
JAMES BALDWINPerhaps he is a fool or a coward but almost everybody is one or the other and most people are both.
JAMES BALDWINIf a society permits one portion of its citizenry to be menaced or destroyed, then, very soon, no one in that society is safe.
JAMES BALDWINPeople 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 BALDWINIt is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
JAMES BALDWINYou were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason.
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 BALDWINLiterature is indispensable to the world.
JAMES BALDWINLife 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 BALDWINThe impossible is the least that one can demand.
JAMES BALDWINYou think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
JAMES BALDWINIt is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
JAMES BALDWINNothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.
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 BALDWIN