Top 500 James Baldwin Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “We are very cruelly trapped between what we would like to be and what we actually are. And we cannot possibly become what we would like to be until we are willing to ask ourselves just why the lives we lead on this continent are mainly so empty, so tame, and so ugly.”

— James Baldwin

452. “One must be careful not to take refuge in any delusion.”

— James Baldwin

453. “You go to white movies and, like everybody else, you fall in love with Joan Crawford, and you root for the Good Guys who are killing off the Indians. It comes as a great psychological collision when you realize all of these things are really metaphors for your oppression, and will lead into a kind of psychological warfare in which you may perish.”

— James Baldwin

454. “Americans are as unlike any other white people in the world as it is possible to be. I do not think, for example, that it is too much to suggest that the American vision of the world – which allows so little reality, generally speaking, for any of the darker forces in human life, which tends until today to paint moral issues in glaring black and white – owes a great deal to the battle waged by Americans to maintain between themselves and black men a human separation which could not be bridged.”

— James Baldwin

455. “My novel’s about Brooklyn.” “The tree? Or the kids or the murderers or the junkies?” Vivaldo swallowed. “All of them.” “That’s quite an assignment. And if you don’t mind my saying so, it sounds just a little bit old fashioned.” He put his hand before his mouth and burped. “Brooklyn’s been done. And done.”

— James Baldwin

456. “Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.”

— James Baldwin

457. “But as long as we in the West place on color the value that we do, we make it impossible for the great unwashed to consolidate themselves according to any other principle. Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.”

— James Baldwin

458. “This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you should perish.”

— James Baldwin

459. “But white Americans do not believe in death, and this is why the darkness of my skin so intimidates them.”

— James Baldwin

460. “The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.”

— James Baldwin

461. “Time is just common, it’s like water for a fish. Everybody’s in this water, nobody gets out of it, or if he does the same thing happens to him that happens to the fish, he dies. And you know what happens in this water, time? The big fish eat the little fish. That’s all. The big fish eat the little fish and the ocean doesn’t care.”

— James Baldwin

462. “There is no way of conveying to the corpse the reasons you have made him one – you have the corpse, and you are, thereafter, at themercy of a fact which missed the truth, which means that the corpse has you.”

— James Baldwin

463. “He wished he could rescue her, that it was within his power to rescue her and make her life less hard. But it was only love which could accomplish the miracle of making a life bearable – only love, and love itself mostly failed; and he had never loved her. He had used her to find out something about himself. And even this was not true. He had used her in the hope of avoiding a confrontation with himself which he had, nevertheless, and with a vengeance, been forced to endure.”

— James Baldwin

464. “The morning weighs on my shoulders with the dreadful weight of hope and I take the blue envelope which Jacques has sent me and tear it slowly into many pieces, watching them dance in the wind, watching the wind carry them away. Yet, as I turn and begin walking toward the waiting people, the wind blows some of them back on me.”

— James Baldwin

465. “It seems to be typical of life in America, where opportunities, real and fancied, are thicker than anywhere else on the globe, that the second generation has no time to talk to the first.”

— James Baldwin

466. “And he knew again that she was not saying everything she meant; in a kind of secret language she was telling him today something that he must remember and understand tomorrow. He watched her face, his heart swollen with love for her and with an anguish, not yet his own, that he did not understand and that frightened him.”

— James Baldwin

467. “We live in a country in which words are mostly used to cover the sleeper, not to wake him up; and therefore, it seems to me, the adulation so cruelly proffered our elders has nothing to do with their achievement – which, I repeat, was mighty – but has to do with our impulse to look back on what we now imagine to have been a happier time. It is an adulation which has panic at the root.”

— James Baldwin

468. “A real writer is always shifting and changing and searching.”

— James Baldwin

469. “The price of the liberation of the white people is the liberation of the blacks – the total liberation, in the cities, in the towns, before the law, and in the mind.”

— James Baldwin

470. “In short, we, the black and the white, deeply need each other here if we are really to become a nation- if we really, that is, to achieve our identity, our maturity, as men and women. To create one nation has proved to be a hideously difficult task.”

— James Baldwin

471. “They are just dirty, all of them, low and cheap and dirty.′ He stretched out his hand and pulled me down to the floor beside him. ‘All except you. Tous, sauf toi.’ He held my face between his hands and I supposed such tenderness has scarcely ever produced such terror as I then felt. ‘Ne me laisse pas tomber, je t’en prie,’ he said, and kissed me, with a strange insistent gentleness on the mouth.”

— James Baldwin

472. “Loving anybody and being loved by anybody is a tremendous danger, a tremendous responsibility. Loving of children, raising of children. The terrors homosexuals go through in this society would not be so great if the society itself did not go through so many terrors which it doesn’t want to admit. The discovery of one’s sexual preference doesn’t have to be a trauma. It’s a trauma because it’s such a traumatized society.”

— James Baldwin

473. “Observing that, from this height, the city which had been so dark as he walked through it seemed to be on fire.”

— James Baldwin

474. “They knew that no one heard, that bloodless people cannot be made to bleed. So they blew what everyone had heard before, they reassured everyone that nothing terrible was happening.”

— James Baldwin

475. “A man’s balance depends on the weight he carries between his legs.”

— James Baldwin

476. “I thought she would be fun to have fun with.”

— James Baldwin

477. “The glorification of one race and the consequent debasement of another – or others – always has been and always will be a recipe for murder. There is no way around this. If one is permitted to treat any group of people with special disfavor because of their race or the color of their skin, there is no limit to what one will force them to endure, and, since the entire race has been mysteriously indicted, no reason not to attempt to destroy it root and branch.”

— James Baldwin

478. “You face reality, not the lights. The lights go off as quickly as they come on.”

— James Baldwin

479. “I know a lot of people done took their own lives and they’re walking up and down the streets today and some of them is preaching the gospel and some is sitting in the seats of the mighty. Now, you remember that. If the world wasn’t so full of dead folks maybe those of us that’s trying to live wouldn’t have to suffer so bad.”

— James Baldwin

480. “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.”

— James Baldwin

481. “Assimilation was frequently but another name for the very special brand of relations between human beings which had been imposed by colonialism. These relations demanded that the individual, torn from the context to which he owed his identity, should replace his habits of feeling, thinking, and acting by another set of habits which belonged to the strangers who dominated him.”

— James Baldwin

482. “When you’re writing you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know.”

— James Baldwin

483. “The male cannot bear very much humiliation; and he really cannot bear it, it obliterates him.”

— James Baldwin

484. “When the white man came to Africa, the white man had the Bible and the African had the land, but now it is the white man who is being, reluctantly and bloodily, separated from the land, and the African who is still attempting to digest or to vomit up the Bible.”

— James Baldwin

485. “It is only because the world looks on his talent with such a frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make his talent important.”

— James Baldwin

486. “This lack of what may roughly be called social paranoia causes the American writer in Europe to feel – almost certainly for the first time in his life – that he can reach out to everyone, that he is accessible to everyone and open to everything. This is an extraordinary feeling. He feels, so to speak, his own weight, his own value.”

— James Baldwin

487. “I wanted to say so many things. Yet when I opened my mouth, I made no sound. And yet – I do not know what I felt for Giovanni. I felt nothing for Giovanni, I felt terror and pity and a rising lust.”

— James Baldwin

488. “Years ago, when he was around fourteen, he’d been all hipped on the idea of going to India. He read books about people sitting on rocks, naked, in all kinds of weather, but mostly bad, naturally, and walking barefoot through hot coals and arriving at wisdom. I used to say that it sounded to me as though they were getting away from wisdom as fast as they could. I think he sort of looked down on me for that.”

— James Baldwin

489. “You might feel different out there, with all the sunshine and oranges and all.”

— James Baldwin

490. “If your countrymen think that privacy is a crime, so much the worse for your country.”

— James Baldwin

491. “Nobody can stay in the garden of Eden,” Jacques said. And then: “I wonder why.”

— James Baldwin

492. “She was twenty and had come to realize that, though she had a voice, she wasn’t a singer; that to endure and embrace the life of a singer demands a whole lot more than a voice.”

— James Baldwin

493. “The making of an American begins at the point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land.”

— James Baldwin

494. “A writer has to take all the risks of putting down what he sees.”

— James Baldwin

495. “Oedipus did not remember the thongs that bound his feet; nevertheless the marks they left testified to that doom toward which his feet were leading him. The man does not remember the hand that struck him, the darkness that frightened him, as a child; nevertheless, the hand and the darkness remain with him, indivisible from himself forever, part of the passion that drives him wherever he thinks to take flight.”

— James Baldwin

496. “Artists are the only people in a society who will tell that society the truth about itself.”

— James Baldwin

497. “I am proud of these people not because of their color but because of their intelligence and their spiritual force and their beauty. The country should be proud of them, too, but, alas, not many people in this country even know of their existence. And the reason for this ignorance is that a knowledge of the role these people played – and play – in American life would reveal more about America to Americans than Americans wish to know.”

— James Baldwin

498. “You don’t know what he means by friendship but you have the feeling it may not be safe. You are afraid it may change you. What kind of friendship have you had?”

— James Baldwin

499. “Souvenez vous,” she tells me. “One must make a little prayer from time to time.”

— James Baldwin

500. “It is not a racial problem. It is a problem of whether or not you’re willing to look at your life and be responsible for it, and then begin to change it.”

— James Baldwin