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Top James Baldwin Quotes

Browse top 188 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by James Baldwin.

Favorite James Baldwin Quotes

1. "It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless." ~ James Baldwin
2. "We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours." ~ James Baldwin
3. "If I could make you stay, I would,' he shouted. ‘If I had to beat you, chain you, starve you—if I could make you stay, I would.' He turned back into the room; the wind blew his hair. He shook his finger at me, grotesquely playful. ‘One day, perhaps, you will wish I had." ~ James Baldwin
4. "Love him,' said Jacques, with vehemence, ‘love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters? And how long, at the best, can it last, since you are both men and still have everywhere to go? Only five minutes, I assure you, only five minutes, and most of that, helas! in the dark. And if you think of them as dirty, then they will be dirty— they will be dirty because you will be giving nothing, you will be despising your flesh and his. But you can make your time together anything but dirty, you can give each other something which will make both of you better—forever—if you will not be ashamed, if you will only not play it safe.' He paused, watching me, and then looked down to his cognac. ‘You play it safe long enough,' he said, in a different tone, ‘and you'll end up trapped in your own dirty body, forever and forever and forever—like me." ~ James Baldwin
5. "If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him." ~ James Baldwin
6. "We had bought a kilo of cherries and we were eating them as we walked along. We were both insufferably childish and high-spirited that afternoon and th spectacle we presented, two grown men, jostling each other on the wide sidewalk, and aiming the cherry-pips, as though they were spitballs, into each other's facesm must have been outrageous. And I realized that such childishness was fantastic at my age and the happiness out of which it sprang yet more so; for that moment I really loved Giovanni, who had never seemed more beautiful than he was that afternoon. And, watching his face, I realized that it meant much to me that I could make his face so bright. I saw that I might be willing to give a great deal not to lose that power. And I felt myself flow toward him, as a river rushes when the ice breaks up." ~ James Baldwin
7. "Tell me, he said, "What is this thing about time? Why is it better to be late than early? People are always saying, we must wait, we must wait. what are they waiting for?""Well […] I guess people wait in order to make sure of what they feel.""And when you have waited—-has it made you sure?" ~ James Baldwin
8. "Being in trouble can have a funny effect on the mind. I don't know if I can explain this. You go through some days and you seem to be hearing people and you seem to be talking to them and you seem to be doing your work, or, at least, your work gets done; but you haven't seen or heard a soul and if someone asked you what you have done that day you'd have to think awhile before you could answer. But at the same time, and even on the self-same day-- and this is what is hard to explain--you see people like you never saw them before." ~ James Baldwin
9. "Sanirim iki insanin hem gülmesi hem sevismesi, güldükleri için sevismeleri ve sevistikleri için gülmeleri pek az rastlanir bir durumdur. Sevmek ve gülmek hep ayni yerden gelir de, o noktaya pek çok kisi erisemez." ~ James Baldwin
10. "And her mother still struggled in these white kitchens in town, humming sweet hymns, tiny, mild eyed and bent, her father still labored on the oyster boats; after a lifetime of labor, should they drop dead tomorrow, there would not be a penny for their burial clothes." ~ James Baldwin
11. "Whose little boy are you?" ~ James Baldwin
12. "Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition." ~ James Baldwin
13. "The colors on the river faded, the rain began, and the river began to rise. It was apparent that the sun would soon give up the tremendous struggle it cost her to get to Paris for a few hours every day." ~ James Baldwin
14. "Even the most incorrigible maverick has to be born somewhere. He may leave the group that produced him--he may be forced to--but nothing will efface his origins, the marks of which he carries with him everywhere. I think it is important to know this and even find it a matter for rejoicing, as the strongest people do, regardless of their station. On this acceptance, literally, the life of a writer depends." ~ James Baldwin
15. "He did not seem to know enough about the people in his novel. They did not seem to trust him. They were all named, more or less, all more or less destined, the pattern he wished them to describe was clear to him. But it did not seem clear to them. He could move them about but they themselves did not move. He put words in their mouths which they uttered sullenly, unconvinced. With the same agony, or greater, with which he attempted to seduce a woman, he was trying to seduce his people: he begged them to surrender up their privacy. And they refused - without, for all their ugly intransigence, showing the faintest desire to leave him. They were waiting for him to find the key, press the nerve, tell the truth." ~ James Baldwin
16. "The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him." ~ James Baldwin
17. "Confession Who knows more of Wanda, the wan, than I do? And who knows more of Terry, the torn, than I do? And who knows more than I do of Ziggy, the Zap, fleeing the rap, using his eyes and teeth to spring the trap, than I do!      Or did. Good Lord, forbid that morning's acre, held in the palm" ~ James Baldwin
18. "You stop that,' he said, in a voice which he did not recognise. ‘You stop that. You stop trying to kill me. It's not my fault I'm white. It's not my fault you're black. It's not my fault he's dead." ~ James Baldwin
19. "Don't you see how unjust it was to wait for me to find it out? To put all the burden on me? I had the right to expect to hear from you—women are always waiting for the man to speak." ~ James Baldwin
20. "A real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things that can be named." ~ James Baldwin
21. "Nobody can stay in the garden of Eden...I wonder why." ~ James Baldwin
22. "Well,' I said, ‘Paris is old, is many centuries. You feel, in Paris, all the time gone by. That isn't what you feel in New York — 'He was smiling. I stopped.‘What do you feel in New York?' he asked.‘Perhaps you feel,' I told him, ‘all the time to come. There's such power there, everything is in such movement. You can't help wondering—I can't help wondering—what it will all be like—many years from now." ~ James Baldwin
23. "He leaned up a little and watched her face. Her face would now be, forever, more mysterious and impenetrable than the face of any stranger. Strangers' faces hold no secrets because the imagination does not invest them with any. But the face of a lover is an unknown precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment." ~ James Baldwin
24. "You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason. The limits of your ambition were, thus, expected to be set forever. You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity. Wherever you have turned, James, in your short time on this earth, you have been told where you could go and what you could do (and how you could do it) and where you could live and whom you could marry. I know your countrymen do not agree with me about this, and I hear them saying "You exaggerate." They do not know Harlem, and I do. So do you. Take no one's word for anything, including mine- but trust your experience. Know whence you came." ~ James Baldwin
25. "...in order for this to happen, your entire frame of reference will have to change, and you will be forced to surrender many things that you now scarcely know you have." ~ James Baldwin
26. "White people...have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this -- which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never -- the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed." ~ James Baldwin
27. "You don't have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back." ~ James Baldwin
28. "Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden, I don't know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword. Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both." ~ James Baldwin
29. "There is an illusion about America, a myth about America to which we are clinging which has nothing to do with the lives we lead and I don't believe that anybody in this country who has really thought about it or really almost anybody who has been brought up against it--and almost all of us have one way or another--this collision between one's image of oneself and what one actually is is always very painful and there are two things you can do about it, you can meet the collision head-on and try and become what you really are or you can retreat and try to remain what you thought you were, which is a fantasy, in which you will certainly perish." ~ James Baldwin
30. "For I am—or I was—one of those people who pride themselves in on their willpower, on their ability to make a decision and carry it through. This virtue, like most virtues, is ambiguity itself. People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception. Their decisions are not really decisions at all—a real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things than can be named—but elaborate systems of evasion, of illusion, designed to make themselves and the world appear to be what they and the world are not. This is certainly what my decision, made so long ago in Joey's bed, came to. I had decided to allow no room in the universe for something which shamed and frightened me. I succeeded very well—by not looking at the universe, by not looking at myself, by remaining, in effect, in constant motion." ~ James Baldwin
31. "How can one... dream of power in any other terms than in the symbols of power?" ~ James Baldwin
32. "She, who had descended with such joy and pain, had begun her upward climb—upward, with her baby, on the steep, steep side of the mountain." ~ James Baldwin
33. "Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent--which attitude certainly has a great deal to support it. On the other hand, it is only because the world looks on his talent with such frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make his talent important." ~ James Baldwin
34. "There were hardly any coloured people in the town I grew up in – how am I to know?' And she hated herself for her next question, but she could not hold it back: ‘Don't you think I deserve some credit, for trying to be human, for not being a part of all that, for – walking out?" ~ James Baldwin
35. "Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black." ~ James Baldwin
36. "People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them." ~ James Baldwin
37. "Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, not current as far as I know in the language of any other people, which certainly does not mean what it says but betrays a nagging suspicion that something has been misplaced. I think now that if I had any intimation that the self I was going to find would turn out to be only the same self from which I had spent so much time in flight, I would have stayed at home." ~ James Baldwin
38. "People who cling to their illusions find it difficult, if not impossible, to learn anything worth learning: a people under the necessity of creating themselves must examine everything, and soak up learning the way the roots of a tree soak up water." ~ James Baldwin
39. "Money, iit turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of otherthings if you did." ~ James Baldwin
40. "Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover's war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, to make freedom real." ~ James Baldwin
41. "People are continually pointing out to me the wretchedness of white people in order to console me for the wretchedness of blacks. But an itemized account of the American failure does not console me and it should not console anyone else. That hundreds of thousands of white people are living, in effect, no better than the "niggers" is not a fact to be regarded with complacency. The social and moral bankruptcy suggested by this fact is of the bitterest, most terrifying kind." ~ James Baldwin
42. "It will be hard James but you come from sturdy peasant stock men who picked cotton and dammed rivers and built railroads and in the teeth of the most terrifying odds achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity You come from a long line of great poets some of the greatest poets since Homer. One of them said "The very time I thought I was lost My dungeon shook and my chains fell off." You know and I know that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon. We cannot be free until they are free. God bless you James and Godspeed." ~ James Baldwin
43. "I was guilty and irritated and full of love and pain. I wanted to kick him and I wanted to take him in my arms." ~ James Baldwin
44. "It happened, as many things do, imperceptibly, in many ways at once. I date it - the slow crumbling of my faith, the pulverization of my fortress - from the time, about a year after I had begun to preach, when I began to read again. I justified this desire by the fact that I was still in school, and I began, fatally, with Dostoyevsky." ~ James Baldwin
45. "In those days my mother was given to the exasperating and mysterious habit of having babies." ~ James Baldwin
46. "Looking at his face, it sometimes came to her that all women had been cursed from the cradle; all, in one fashion or another, being given the same cruel destiny, born to suffer the weight of men. Frank claimed that she got it all wrong side up: it was men who suffered because they had to put up with the ways of women—and this from the time that they were born until the day they died." ~ James Baldwin
47. "And yet - when one begins to search for the crucial, the definitive moment, the moment which changed all others, one finds one-self pressing, in great pain, through a maze of false signals and abruptly locking doors." ~ James Baldwin
48. "His touch could never fail to make me feel desire; yet his hot, sweet breath also made me want to vomit." ~ James Baldwin
49. "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. And at such a moment, unable to see and not daring to imagine what the future will now bring forth, one clings to what one knew, or dreamed that one possessed. Yet, it is only when a man is able, without bitterness or self-pity, to surrender a dream he has long possessed that he is set free - he has set himself free - for higher dreams, for greater privileges." ~ James Baldwin
50. "But to look back from the stony plain along the road which led one to that place is not at all the same thing as walking on the road; the perspective to say the very least, changes only with the journey; only when the road has, all abruptly and treacherously, and with an absoluteness that permits no argument, turned or dropped or risen is one able to see all that one could not have seen from any other place." ~ James Baldwin
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I'm lighter now in a lot of ways."
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What Did James Baldwin Talk About?

Thin
Ear
Hey
Wit
Hen
Here
Per
Con
Use
Self
Ally
Thou
End
Ways
Bee
King
Act
Able
Cause
Lit
Old
She
Mad
Less
Seem
Owe
Each
Ten
Hang
Though
Face
Son
Ring
Pen
Body
Tan
Era
Lack
Ought
Said
Hum
Hear
Low
Sin
Lie
Ears
Black
Perhaps
Does
Came

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