If you're afraid to die, you will not be able to live.
JAMES BALDWIN Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and t...
JAMES BALDWIN The future is like heaven. Everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now.
JAMES BALDWIN The world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.
JAMES BALDWIN A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled. -James...
JAMES BALDWIN It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the i...
JAMES BALDWIN Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imita...
JAMES BALDWIN Nakedness has no color: this can come as news only to those who have never covered, or been covered ...
JAMES BALDWIN People can cry much easier than they can change.
JAMES BALDWIN You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you ...
JAMES BALDWIN If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more...
JAMES BALDWIN Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love ...
JAMES BALDWIN Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and th...
JAMES BALDWIN Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love ...
JAMES BALDWIN Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
JAMES BALDWIN Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy...
JAMES BALDWIN Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty o...
JAMES BALDWIN The question of sexual dominance can exist only in the nightmare of that soul which has armed itself...
JAMES BALDWIN The American ideal of sexuality appears to be rooted in the American ideal of masculinity. This idea...
JAMES BALDWIN The greatest significance of the present student generation is that it is through them that the poin...
JAMES BALDWIN If you're treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described...
JAMES BALDWIN Society is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that ...
JAMES BALDWIN People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast...
JAMES BALDWIN When the book comes out it may hurt you -- but in order for me to do it, it had to hurt me first. I ...
JAMES BALDWIN I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once h...
JAMES BALDWIN There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the m...
JAMES BALDWIN But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without mo...
JAMES BALDWIN Anyone who has struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
JAMES BALDWIN Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others. Pessimists are also people ...
JAMES BALDWIN I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on ...
JAMES BALDWIN We cannot discuss the state of our minorities until we first have some sense of what we are, who we ...
JAMES BALDWIN We are all androgynous, not only because we are all born of a woman impregnated by the seed of a man...
JAMES BALDWIN Fires can't be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in...
JAMES BALDWIN The paradox of education is precisely this -- that as one begins to become conscious one begins to e...
JAMES BALDWIN It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the inde...
JAMES BALDWIN A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
JAMES BALDWIN People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on...
JAMES BALDWIN The making of an American begins at the point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other his...
JAMES BALDWIN An identity is questioned only when it is menaced, as when the mighty begin to fall, or when the wre...
JAMES BALDWIN An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience...
JAMES BALDWIN You know, it's not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world...
JAMES BALDWIN The establishment of democracy on the American continent was scarcely as radical a break with the pa...
JAMES BALDWIN Be careful what you set your heart upon -- for it will surely be yours.
JAMES BALDWIN For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting...
JAMES BALDWIN The future is... black.
JAMES BALDWIN Any honest examination of the national life proves how far we are from the standard of human freedom...
JAMES BALDWIN Words like freedom, justice, democracy are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. Peop...
JAMES BALDWIN James Joyce is right about history being a nightmare-- but it may be that nightmare from which no on...
JAMES BALDWIN If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze...
JAMES BALDWIN There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own e...
JAMES BALDWIN Experience is a private, and a very largely speechless affair.
JAMES BALDWIN Experience that destroys innocents also leads one back to it.
JAMES BALDWIN Voyagers discover that the world can never be larger than the person that is in the world; but it is...
JAMES BALDWIN When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.
JAMES BALDWIN No one is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart: for his purity, by definition, ...
JAMES BALDWIN No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, fo...
JAMES BALDWIN Christianity has operated with an unmitigated arrogance and cruelty -- necessarily, since a religion...
JAMES BALDWIN There is a sanctity involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one ou...
JAMES BALDWIN Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imita...
JAMES BALDWIN It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themsel...
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 s...
JAMES BALDWIN Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
JAMES BALDWIN People can cry much easier than they can change.
JAMES BALDWIN The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an immediate knowledge of its ugly si...
JAMES BALDWIN The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, ...
JAMES BALDWIN All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forc...
JAMES BALDWIN Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossibilit...
JAMES BALDWIN We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied ...
JAMES BALDWIN The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
JAMES BALDWIN Rage cannot be hidden, it can only be dissembled. This dissembling deludes the thoughtless, and stre...
JAMES BALDWIN Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocu...
JAMES BALDWIN Everything in life depends on how that life accepts its limits.
JAMES BALDWIN He may be a very nice man. But I haven't got the time to figure that out. All I know is, he's got a ...
JAMES BALDWIN The American ideal, after all, is that everyone should be as much alike as possible.
JAMES BALDWIN Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immut...
JAMES BALDWIN The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers.
JAMES BALDWIN For I am—or I was—one of those people who pride themselves in on their willpower, on their abili...
JAMES BALDWIN I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on th...
JAMES BALDWIN Anyone who had ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
JAMES BALDWIN The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, ...
JAMES BALDWIN Whose little boy are you?
JAMES BALDWIN There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for the...
JAMES BALDWIN There appears to be a vast amount of confusion on this point, but I do not know many Negroes who are...
JAMES BALDWIN To accept one's past -- one's history -- is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how...
JAMES BALDWIN Other people cannot see what I see whenever I look into your father's face, for behind your father's...
JAMES BALDWIN Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty o...
JAMES BALDWIN If you're treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are descr...
JAMES BALDWIN Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
JAMES BALDWIN I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once h...
JAMES BALDWIN There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be reall...
JAMES BALDWIN It is only because the world looks on his talent with such a frightening indifference that the arti...
JAMES BALDWIN Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others. Pessimists are also peopl...
JAMES BALDWIN A platitude is simply a truth repeated till people get tired of hearing it.
JAMES BALDWIN We take our shape, it is true, within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth; a...
JAMES BALDWIN The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
JAMES BALDWIN We go down the hall again, thank heaven, to my drink.
JAMES BALDWIN Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck -- but, most of all, endurance.
JAMES BALDWIN The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers.
JAMES BALDWIN Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where...
JAMES BALDWIN I imagine one of the reasons people cling to thier hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once h...
JAMES BALDWIN I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.
JAMES BALDWIN All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forc...
JAMES BALDWIN It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the In...
JAMES BALDWIN Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense...
JAMES BALDWIN Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossib...
JAMES BALDWIN The fact that their [the flower children's] uniforms and their jargons precisely represented the dis...
JAMES BALDWIN The first time I saw Reverend Shuttlesworth, for example, he came strolling across the parking lot o...
JAMES BALDWIN To be liberated from the stigma of blackness by embracing it is to cease, forever, one's interior ar...
JAMES BALDWIN The distance between us, and I had never thought of this before, was that they did not know this, an...
JAMES BALDWIN Afro-Americans. Which is but a wedding, however, of two confusions, an arbitrary linking of two unde...
JAMES BALDWIN People, even if they are so thoughtless as to be born black, do not come into this world merely to p...
JAMES BALDWIN I remembered his older brother, who had died in Sicily, in battle for the free world- he had barely ...
JAMES BALDWIN Incontestably, alas, most people are not, in action, worth very much; and yet, every human being is ...
JAMES BALDWIN All the western nations are caught in a lie, the lie of their pretended humanism: this means that th...
JAMES BALDWIN It must be remembered that in those great days I was considered to be an "integrationist" - this was...
JAMES BALDWIN The poet or the revolutionary is there to articulate the necessity, but until the people themselves ...
JAMES BALDWIN I was in a terrible confusion. Sometimes I thought, but this is your life. Stop fighting it. Stop fi...
JAMES BALDWIN I saw myself, sharply, as a wanderer, an adventurer, rocking through the world, unanchored.
JAMES BALDWIN People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their...
JAMES BALDWIN Somebody," said Jacques, "your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever di...
JAMES BALDWIN Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, not current a...
JAMES BALDWIN Tell me, he said, "What is this thing about time? Why is it better to be late than early? People are...
JAMES BALDWIN People can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than th...
JAMES BALDWIN With everything in me screaming No! yet the sum of me sighed Yes.
JAMES BALDWIN I hope that nobody has ever had to look at anybody they love through glass.
JAMES BALDWIN Only a man can see in the face of a woman the girl she was. It is a secret which can be revealed onl...
JAMES BALDWIN You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you ...
JAMES BALDWIN The time has come to realize that the interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not ...
JAMES BALDWIN Allegiance, after all, has to work two ways; and one can grow weary of an allegiance which is not re...
JAMES BALDWIN People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to...
JAMES BALDWIN [I am] someone who represents a very complex country which insists on being simple-minded. And simpl...
JAMES BALDWIN Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
JAMES BALDWIN Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are...
JAMES BALDWIN Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
JAMES BALDWIN Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young...
JAMES BALDWIN It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the indepen...
JAMES BALDWIN If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go.
JAMES BALDWIN The power to define the other seals one's definition of oneself.
JAMES BALDWIN It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, b...
JAMES BALDWIN Our crown has already been bought and paid for. All we have to do is wear it
JAMES BALDWIN If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own-which it is-and render impass...
JAMES BALDWIN In my experience - and this is a very awkward way to put it, since I don't really know what the word...
JAMES BALDWIN But to look back from the stony plain along the road which led one to that place is not at all the s...
JAMES BALDWIN To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be JAMES BALDWIN The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to ex...
JAMES BALDWIN If one wishes to be instructed--not that anyone does--concerning the treacherous role that memory pl...
JAMES BALDWIN And here I was, left with only myself to deal with. It was entirely up to me.
JAMES BALDWIN The subtle and deadly change of heart that might occur in you would be involved with the realization...
JAMES BALDWIN Many have given up. They stay home and watch the TV screen, living on the earnings of their parents,...
JAMES BALDWIN I remembered my mother’s insistence that I always wear clean underwear because I might get knocked...
JAMES BALDWIN Life is tragic simply because the earth turns, and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, f...
JAMES BALDWIN Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that ga...
JAMES BALDWIN The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
JAMES BALDWIN It takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do bo...
JAMES BALDWIN It was not only colored people who praised John, since they could not, John felt, in any case really...
JAMES BALDWIN Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, fo...
JAMES BALDWIN She knows Daddy better than I do. I think it's because she's felt since we were children that our Da...
JAMES BALDWIN I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I w...
JAMES BALDWIN I know that people can be better than they are. We are capable of bearing a great burden, once we di...
JAMES BALDWIN Some moments in a life, and they needn't be very long or seem very important, can make up for so muc...
JAMES BALDWIN The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the fo...
JAMES BALDWIN It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connect...
JAMES BALDWIN If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more...
JAMES BALDWIN There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for the...
JAMES BALDWIN It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death-- ought to decide, indeed, to earn one...
JAMES BALDWIN The universe, which is not merely the stars and the moon and the planets, flowers, grass and trees, ...
JAMES BALDWIN In order for this to happen, your entire frame of reference will have to change, and you will be for...
JAMES BALDWIN Colour is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.
JAMES BALDWIN It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even ...
JAMES BALDWIN I can't be a pessimist because I'm alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human li...
JAMES BALDWIN No one knows very much about the life of another. This ignorance becomes vivid, if you love another....
JAMES BALDWIN Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty o...
JAMES BALDWIN I have met only a very few people - and most of these were not Americans - who had any real desire t...
JAMES BALDWIN To accept one's past - one's history - is not the same things as drowning in it. An invented past ca...
JAMES BALDWIN There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.
JAMES BALDWIN When the white man came to Africa, the white man had the Bible and the African had the land, but now...
JAMES BALDWIN All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by dro...
JAMES BALDWIN You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for...
JAMES BALDWIN I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it. And I know, which ...
JAMES BALDWIN The impossible is the least that one can demand.
JAMES BALDWIN The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed the collection of myths to which...
JAMES BALDWIN Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?
JAMES BALDWIN how can one respect, let alone adopt, the values of a people who do not, on any level whatever, live...
JAMES BALDWIN Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immu...
JAMES BALDWIN Whoever debases others is debasing himself.
JAMES BALDWIN Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does ...
JAMES BALDWIN Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use t...
JAMES BALDWIN But it was not the room’s disorder which was frightening; it was the fact that when one began sear...
JAMES BALDWIN People are continually pointing out to me the wretchedness of white people in order to console me fo...
JAMES BALDWIN I must—to be honest—add that my ministry almost certainly helped me through my adolescence by gi...
JAMES BALDWIN The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or sh...
JAMES BALDWIN You write in order to change the world ... if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look a...
JAMES BALDWIN I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do.
JAMES BALDWIN People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And the...
JAMES BALDWIN The future is like heaven, everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now.
JAMES BALDWIN Perhaps he is a fool or a coward but almost everybody is one or the other and most people are both.
JAMES BALDWIN Everybody's journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The ...
JAMES BALDWIN You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you ...
JAMES BALDWIN The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
JAMES A. BALDWIN Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
JAMES A. BALDWIN