Baldwin Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Baldwin. Here they are! All 100 of them:

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. 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, who had ever been alive.
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 is a growing up.
James Baldwin
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
James Baldwin
I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.
James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time)
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
James Baldwin
Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
James Baldwin
Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
James Baldwin (Giovanni’s Room)
I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.
James Baldwin
I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do.
James Baldwin
All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.
James Baldwin
Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be
James Baldwin
The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.
James Baldwin
People 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 Baldwin
Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
James Baldwin
I would rather trust a woman's instinct than a man's reason.
Stanley Baldwin
You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.
James Baldwin (Giovanni’s Room)
Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
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 (Giovanni’s Room)
The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time)
People can cry much easier than they can change.
James Baldwin
It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.
James Baldwin (Collected Essays: Notes of a Native Son / Nobody Knows My Name / The Fire Next Time / No Name in the Street / The Devil Finds Work / Other Essays)
To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.
James Baldwin
It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
James Baldwin
People can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.
James Baldwin (Giovanni’s Room)
Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity
James Baldwin (Holt McDougal Library, High School with Connections: Student Text The Fire Next Time)
If 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 Baldwin (Giovanni’s Room)
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 (The Fire Next Time)
It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
James Baldwin
Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.
James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time)
The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.
James Baldwin
The 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 Baldwin
Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore
James Baldwin (Giovanni’s Room)
Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.
James Baldwin
You write in order to change the world ... if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.
James Baldwin
Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.
James Baldwin (If Beale Street Could Talk)
True rebels after all, are as rare as true lovers,and in both cases, to mistake a fever for passion can destroy one's life
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. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death--ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.
James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time)
Somebody," said Jacques, "your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour--and in the oddest places!--for the lack of it.
James Baldwin (Giovanni’s Room)
People don't have any mercy. They tear you limb from limb, in the name of love. Then, when you're dead, when they've killed you by what they made you go through, they say you didn't have any character. They weep big, bitter tears - not for you. For themselves, because they've lost their toy.
James Baldwin (Another Country)
I often wonder what I'd do if there weren't any books in the world.
James Baldwin (Giovanni’s Room)
People 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 Baldwin
To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.
James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time)
Whoever debases others is debasing himself.
James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time)
Everybody's journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.
James Baldwin
People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state on innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.
James Baldwin
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.
James Baldwin (Giovanni’s Room)
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 (Giovanni’s Room)
To accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.
James Baldwin
You 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
The place in which I'll fit will not exist until I make it.
James Baldwin
Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.
James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time)
Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?
James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time)
Those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.
James Baldwin
For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness.
James Baldwin (Sonny's Blues)
Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.
James Baldwin
...for nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.
James Baldwin (Giovanni’s Room)
Hatred is always self hatred, and there is something suicidal about it.
James Baldwin
The past is gone, and cannot harm you anymore. And while the future is fast coming for you, it always flinches first and settles in as the gentle present.
Cecil Baldwin
Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.
James Baldwin
how can one respect, let alone adopt, the values of a people who do not, on any level whatever, live the way they say they do, or the way they say they should?
James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time)
People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
James Baldwin
The subtle and deadly change of heart that might occur in you would be involved with the realization that a civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.
James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time)
The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains.
James Baldwin (Nobody Knows My Name)
Our crown has already been bought and paid for. All we have to do is wear it
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
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 Baldwin
The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
James Baldwin
The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.
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 (Giovanni’s Room)
The impossible is the least that one can demand.
James Baldwin (Holt McDougal Library, High School with Connections: Student Text The Fire Next Time)
No man is a devil in his own mind.
James Baldwin
It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate.
James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time)
There are people in the world for whom "coming along" is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.
James Baldwin (Go Tell It on the Mountain)
I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it--it, the physical act. I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.
James Baldwin (Giovanni’s Room)
With everything in me screaming No! yet the sum of me sighed Yes.
James Baldwin (Giovanni’s Room)
Nakedness has no color: this can come as news only to those who have never covered, or been covered by, another naked human being.
James Baldwin (No Name in the Street)
If you're treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they're real for you whether they're real or not.
James Baldwin
You know, it's not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.
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 (Nobody Knows My Name)
...love brought you here. If you trusted love this far, don't panic now.
James Baldwin (If Beale Street Could Talk)
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 (Giovanni’s Room)
People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget.
James Baldwin (Giovanni’s Room)
And with every step I took it became more impossible for me to turn back. And my mind was empty—or it was as though my mind had become one enormous, anaesthetized wound. I thought only, One day I'll weep for this. One of these days I'll start to cry.
James Baldwin (Giovanni’s Room)
You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important.
James Baldwin (Conversations with James Baldwin (Literary Conversations Series))
It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be.
James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time)
We all commit our crimes. The thing is to not lie about them -- to try to understand what you have done, why you have done it. That way, you can begin to forgive yourself. That's very important. If you don't forgive yourself you'll never be able to forgive anybody else and you'll go on committing the same crimes forever.
James Baldwin (Another Country)
Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark. Nobody knows what is going to happen to him from one moment to the next, or how one will bear it. This is irreducible. And it's true of everybody. Now, it is true that the nature of society is to create, among its citizens, an illusion of safety; but it is also absolutely true that the safety is always necessarily an illusion. Artists are here to disturb the peace.
James Baldwin
Marginalia Sometimes the notes are ferocious, skirmishes against the author raging along the borders of every page in tiny black script. If I could just get my hands on you, Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien, they seem to say, I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head. Other comments are more offhand, dismissive - Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" - that kind of thing. I remember once looking up from my reading, my thumb as a bookmark, trying to imagine what the person must look like who wrote "Don't be a ninny" alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson. Students are more modest needing to leave only their splayed footprints along the shore of the page. One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's. Another notes the presence of "Irony" fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal. Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers, Hands cupped around their mouths. Absolutely," they shout to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin. Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!" Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points rain down along the sidelines. And if you have managed to graduate from college without ever having written "Man vs. Nature" in a margin, perhaps now is the time to take one step forward. We have all seized the white perimeter as our own and reached for a pen if only to show we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages; we pressed a thought into the wayside, planted an impression along the verge. Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria jotted along the borders of the Gospels brief asides about the pains of copying, a bird singing near their window, or the sunlight that illuminated their page- anonymous men catching a ride into the future on a vessel more lasting than themselves. And you have not read Joshua Reynolds, they say, until you have read him enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling. Yet the one I think of most often, the one that dangles from me like a locket, was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye I borrowed from the local library one slow, hot summer. I was just beginning high school then, reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room, and I cannot tell you how vastly my loneliness was deepened, how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed, when I found on one page A few greasy looking smears and next to them, written in soft pencil- by a beautiful girl, I could tell, whom I would never meet- Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love.
Billy Collins (Picnic, Lightning)
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 (Giovanni’s Room)
The poet or the revolutionary is there to articulate the necessity, but until the people themselves apprehend it, nothing can happen ... Perhaps it can't be done without the poet, but it certainly can't be done without the people. The poet and the people get on generally very badly, and yet they need each other. The poet knows it sooner than the people do. The people usually know it after the poet is dead; but that's all right. The point is to get your work done, and your work is to change the world.
James Baldwin
And this was perhaps the first time in my life that death occurred to me as a reality. I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it—it, the physical act. I had thought of suicide when I was much younger, as, possibly, we all have, but then it would have been for revenge, it would have been my way of informing the world how awfully it had made me suffer. But the silence of the evening, as I wandered home, had nothing to do with that storm, that far off boy. I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.
James Baldwin (Giovanni’s Room)
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 (Giovanni’s Room)
Love has never been a popular movement. And no one's ever wanted, really, to be free. The world is held together, really it is held together, by the love and the passion of a very few people. Otherwise, of course, you can despair. Walk down the street of any city, any afternoon, and look around you. What you've got to remember is what you're looking at is also you. Everyone you're looking at is also you. You could be that person. You could be that monster, you could be that cop. And you have to decide, in yourself, not to be.
James Baldwin
All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason. And his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours.
James Baldwin (Sonny's Blues)
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. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.
James Baldwin
You do not,’ cried Giovanni, sitting up, ‘love anyone! You never have loved anyone, I am sure you never will! You love your purity, you love your mirror—you are just like a little virgin, you walk around with your hands in front of you as though you had some precious metal, gold, silver, rubies, maybe diamonds down there between your legs! You will never give it to anybody, you will never let anybody touch it—man or woman. You want to be clean. You think you came here covered with soap and you think you will go out covered with soap—and you do not want to stink, not even for five minutes, in the meantime.’ He grasped me by the collar, wrestling and caressing at once, fluid and iron at once: saliva spraying from his lips and his eyes full of tears, but with the bones of his face showing and the muscles leaping in his arms and neck. ‘You want to leave Giovanni because he makes you stink. You want to despise Giovanni because he is not afraid of the stink of love. You want to kill him in the name of all your lying little moralities. And you—you are immoral. You are, by far, the most immoral man I have met in all my life. Look, look what you have done to me. Do you think you could have done this if I did not love you? Is this what you should do to love?
James Baldwin (Giovanni’s Room)
The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed the collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace, that Americans have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors, that American men are the world's most direct and virile, that American women are pure. Negroes know far more about white Americans than that; it can almost be said, in fact, that they know about white Americans what parents—or, anyway, mothers—know about their children, and that they very often regard white Americans that way. And perhaps this attitude, held in spite of what they know and have endured, helps to explain why Negroes, on the whole, and until lately, have allowed themselves to feel so little hatred. The tendency has really been, insofar as this was possible, to dismiss white people as the slightly mad victims of their own brainwashing.
James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time)
There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men. Many of them, indeed, know better, but, as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know.
James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time)
Many have given up. They stay home and watch the TV screen, living on the earnings of their parents, cousins, bothers, or uncles, and only leave the house to go to the movies or to the nearest bar. "How're you making it?" on may ask, running into them along the block, or in the bar. "Oh, I'm TV-ing it"; with the saddest, sweetest, most shamefaced of smiles, and from a great distance. This distance one is compelled to respect; anyone who has traveled so far will not easily be dragged again into the world. There are further retreats, of course, than the TV screen or the bar. There are those who are simply sitting on their stoops, "stoned," animated for a moment only, and hideously, by the approach of someone who may lend them the money for a "fix." Or by the approach of someone from whom they can purchase it, one of the shrewd ones, on the way to prison or just coming out.
James Baldwin (Nobody Knows My Name)
If a society permits one portion of its citizenry to be menaced or destroyed, then, very soon, no one in that society is safe. The forces thus released in the people can never be held in check, but run their devouring course, destroying the very foundations which it was imagined they would save. But we are unbelievably ignorant concerning what goes on in our country--to say nothing of what goes on in the rest of the world--and appear to have become too timid to question what we are told. Our failure to trust one another deeply enough to be able to talk to one another has become so great that people with these questions in their hearts do not speak them; our opulence is so pervasive that people who are afraid to lose whatever they think they have persuade themselves of the truth of a lie, and help disseminate it; and God help the innocent here, that man or womn who simply wants to love, and be loved. Unless this would-be lover is able to replace his or her backbone with a steel rod, he or she is doomed. This is no place for love. I know that I am now expected to make a bow in the direction of those millions of unremarked, happy marriages all over America, but I am unable honestly to do so because I find nothing whatever in our moral and social climate--and I am now thinking particularly of the state of our children--to bear witness to their existence. I suspect that when we refer to these happy and so marvelously invisible people, we are simply being nostalgic concerning the happy, simple, God-fearing life which we imagine ourselves once to have lived. In any case, wherever love is found, it unfailingly makes itself felt in the individual, the personal authority of the individual. Judged by this standard, we are a loveless nation. The best that can be said is that some of us are struggling. And what we are struggling against is that death in the heart which leads not only to the shedding of blood, but which reduces human beings to corpses while they live.
James Baldwin (Nothing Personal)