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Top 500 James Baldwin Quotes (2024 Update)
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James Baldwin Quote: “Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shining and all the stars aflame. You would be frightened because it is out of the order of nature. Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one’s sense of one’s own reality. Well, the black man has functioned in the white man’s world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar: and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundation.”
James Baldwin Quote: “With this fearful intimation there opened in me a hatred for Giovanni which was as powerful as my love and which was nourished by the same roots.”
James Baldwin Quote: “Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did.”
James Baldwin Quote: “Yet, hope – the hope that we, human beings, can be better than we are – dies hard; perhaps one can no longer live if one allows that hope to die. But it is also hard to see what one sees. One sees that most human beings are wretched, and, in one way or another, become wicked: because they are so wretched.”
James Baldwin Quote: “Swifter far than summer’s flight, Swifter far than youth’s delight, Swifter far than happy night, Art thou come and gone: As the earth when leaves are dead, As the night when sleep is sped, As the heart when joy is fled, I am left alone, alone.”
James Baldwin Quote: “I think people ought to do what they want to do, what else are they alive for?”
James Baldwin Quote: “For this is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what America must become. 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.”
James Baldwin Quote: “One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.”
James Baldwin Quote: “Perhaps the best way to sum all this up is to say that the people I knew felt, mainly, a peculiar kind of relief when they knew that their boys were being shipped out of the south, to do battle overseas. It was, perhaps, like feeling that the most dangerous part of a dangerous journey had been passed and that now, even if death should come, it would come with honor and without the complicity of their countrymen. Such a death would be, in short, a fact with which one could hope to live.”
James Baldwin Quote: “I remembered my mother’s insistence that I always wear clean underwear because I might get knocked down by a car on the way to or from school and I and the family would be disgraced even beyond the grave, presumably, if my underwear was dirty. And I began to worry, in fact, as the doctor sniffed and prodded, about the state of the shorts I was wearing. This made me want to laugh. But I could not breathe.”
James Baldwin Quote: “Great art can only be created out of love.”
James Baldwin Quote: “There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.”
James Baldwin Quote: “In America, though, life seems to move faster than anywhere else on the globe and each generation is promised more than it will get: which creates, in each generation, a furious, bewildered rage, the rage of people who cannot find solid ground beneath their feet. Just.”
James Baldwin Quote: “You don’t know what’s happening on the other side of the wall, because you don’t want to know.”
James Baldwin Quote: “For nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.”
James Baldwin Quote: “You smiled at me the way you smiled at everyone, you told me what you told everyone – and you tell nothing but lies. What are you always hiding? And do you think I did not know when you made love to me, you were making love to no one? No one! Or everyone – but not me, certainly. I am nothing to you, nothing, and you bring me fever but no delight.”
James Baldwin Quote: “She did not know why he so adored things that were so long dead; what sustenance they gave him, what secrets he hoped to wrest from them. But she understood, at least, that they did give him a kind of bitter nourishment, and that the secrets they held for him were a matter of his life and death. It frightened her because she felt that he was reaching for the moon and that he would, therefore, be dashed down against the rocks; but she did not say any of this.”
James Baldwin Quote: “If all you want to do is make money, the very last thing you need is imagination.”
James Baldwin Quote: “No matter how it seems now, I must confess: I loved him. I do not think that I will ever love anyone like that again. And this might be a great relief if I did not also know that, when the knife has fallen, Giovanni, if he feels anything will feel relief.”
James Baldwin Quote: “He laughed. ‘Baby. Baby. Baby. I love you. And I’m going to build us a table and a whole lot of folks are going to be eating off it for a long, long time to come.”
James Baldwin Quote: “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 Quote: “Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget What thou among the leaves hast never known, The weariness, the fever, and the fret Here, where men sit and hear each other groan; Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies; Where but to think is to be full of sorrow And leaden-eyed despairs;.”
James Baldwin Quote: “Yet one must also recognize that morality is based on ideas and that all ideas are dangerous – dangerous because ideas can only lead to action and where the action leads no man can say.”
James Baldwin Quote: “To accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it.”
James Baldwin Quote: “I can’t be a pessimist because I’m alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter.”
James Baldwin Quote: “I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.”
James Baldwin Quote: “These captive men are the hidden price for a hiden lie: the righteous must be able to locate the damned.”
James Baldwin Quote: “Drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.”
James Baldwin Quote: “It is said that the camera cannot lie, but rarely do we allow it to do anything else, since the camera sees what you point it at: the camera sees what you want it to see.”
James Baldwin Quote: “I am saying that a journey is called that because you cannot know what you will discover on the journey, what you will do with what you find, or what you find will do to you.”
James Baldwin Quote: “Some moments in a life, and they needn’t be very long or seem very important, can make up for so much in that life; can redeem, justify, that pain, that bewilderment, with which one lives, and invest one with the courage not only to endure it, but to profit from it; some moments teach one the price of human connection: if one can live with one’s own pain, then one respects the pain of others, and so, briefly, but transcendentally, we can release each other from pain.”
James Baldwin Quote: “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. The.”
James Baldwin Quote: “Time could not be bought. The only coin time accepted was life.”
James Baldwin Quote: “The question of sexual dominance can exist only in the nightmare of that soul which has armed itself, totally, against the possibility of the changing motion of conquest and surrender, which is love.”
James Baldwin Quote: “Uncle Tom’s Cabin, then, is activated by what might be called a theological terror, the terror of damnation; and the spirit that breathes in this book, hot, self-righteous, fearful, is not different from that spirit of medieval times which sought to exorcize evil by burning witches; and is not different from that terror which activates a lynch mob.”
James Baldwin Quote: “The determination to outwit one’s situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.”
James Baldwin Quote: “The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains.”
James Baldwin Quote: “There is often something beautiful, there is always something awful, in the spectacle of a a person who has lost one of his faculties, a faculty he never questioned until it was gone, and who struggles to recover it. Yet people remain people, on crutches or indeed on deathbeds...”
James Baldwin Quote: “They say the kids are dumb and so they’re teaching them to work with their hands. Those kids aren’t dumb. But the people who run these schools want to make sure that they don’t get smart: they are really teaching the kids to be slaves.”
James Baldwin Quote: “The world should listen then, as I am listening now.”
James Baldwin Quote: “Any society inevitably produces its criminals, but a society at once rigid and unstable can do nothing whatever to alleviate the poverty of its lowest members, cannot present to the hypothetical young man at the crucial moment that so-well-advertised right path.”
James Baldwin Quote: “The relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others in order to end the racial nightmare and acheive our country.”
James Baldwin Quote: “It’s a great city, Paris, a beautiful city––and––it was very good for me.”
James Baldwin Quote: “All of Africa will be free before we can get a lousy cup of coffee.”
James Baldwin Quote: “The noblest spirit is most strongly attracted by the love of glory.”
James Baldwin Quote: “It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian.”
James Baldwin Quote: “A child cannot, thank Heaven, know how vast and how merciless is the nature of power, with what unbelievable cruelty people treat each other. He reacts to the fear in his parents’ voices because his parents hold up the world for him and he has no protection without them.”
James Baldwin Quote: “You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discovered it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky.”
James Baldwin Quote: “I doesn’t do any good to fight with Sonny. Sonny just moves back, inside himself, where he can’t be reached.”
James Baldwin Quote: “People always seem to band together in accordance to a principle that has nothing to do with love, a principle that releases them from personal responsibility.”
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