Top 500 James Baldwin Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “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

452. “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

453. “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

454. “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

455. “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

456. “She was so incredibly beautiful – she seemed to be wearing the sunlight, rearranging it around her from time to time, with a movement of one hand, with a movement of her head, and with her smile – that, when she paid the man and started out of the store, I started out behind her.”

— James Baldwin

457. “I don’t know, now, when I first looked at Hella and found her stale, found her body uninteresting, her presence grating. It seemed to happen all at once – I suppose that only means that it had been happening for a long time.”

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

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

461. “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

462. “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

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. “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

465. “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

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

— James Baldwin

467. “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

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

— James Baldwin

469. “The crime of which you discover slowly you are guilty is not so much that you are aware, which is bad enough, but that other people see that you are and cannot bear to watch it, because it testifies to the fact that they are not.”

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

471. “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

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

— James Baldwin

473. “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

474. “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

475. “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

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

— James Baldwin

477. “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

478. “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

479. “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

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

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

482. “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

483. “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

484. “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

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. “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

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

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

494. “Their singing caused him to believe in the presence of the Lord; indeed, it was no longer a question of belief, because they made that presence real.”

— 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. “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

497. “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

498. “And there was something so artless in this smile that I had to smile back.”

— James Baldwin

499. “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

500. “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.”

— James Baldwin