Top 500 James Baldwin Quotes (2023 Update)
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351. “But if women are supposed to be led by men and there aren’t any men to lead them, what happens then? What happens then?”

— James Baldwin

352. “No curtain under heaven is heavier than that curtain of guilt and lies behind which white Americans hide.”

— James Baldwin

353. “Other people cannot see what I see whenever I look into your father’s face, for behind your father’s face as it is today are all those other faces which were his.”

— James Baldwin

354. “Most people are not naturally reflective any more than they are naturally malicious, and the white man prefers to keep the black man at a certain human remove because it is easier for him thus to preserve his simplicity and avoid being called to account for crimes committed by his forefathers, or his neighbors.”

— James Baldwin

355. “The innocent brightness of a new-born day Is lovely yet: The clouds that gather round the setting sun 19 Do take a sober coloring from an eye That hath kept watch o’er man’s mortality; Another race hath been, and other palms are won.”

— James Baldwin

356. “All of Africa will be free before we can get a lousy cup of coffee.”

— James Baldwin

357. “The writer’s greed is appalling. He wants, or seems to want, everything and practically everybody, in another sense, and at the same time, he needs no one at all.”

— James Baldwin

358. “Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise.”

— James Baldwin

359. “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

360. “A mob is not autonomous: it executes the real will of the people who rule the State.”

— James Baldwin

361. “I think Americans are terrified of feeling anything. I never met a people more infantile in my life.”

— James Baldwin

362. “The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. 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 and fear.”

— James Baldwin

363. “Every man in the chapel hoped that when his hour came he, too, would be eulogized, which is to say forgiven, and that all of his lapses, greeds, errors, and strayings from the truth would be invested with coherence and looked upon with charity. This was perhaps the last thing humans could give each other and it was what they demanded, after all, of the Lord.”

— James Baldwin

364. “Books taught me that things that tormented me the most were the very things that connected me to everyone who is alive and who had ever been alive.”

— James Baldwin

365. “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

366. “People said that he was very nice, but I confess that his utter grotesqueness made me uneasy; perhaps in the same way that the sight of monkeys eating their own excrement turns some people’s stomachs. They might not mind so much if monkeys did not- so grotesquely- resemble human beings.”

— James Baldwin

367. “For a woman,” she said, “I think a man is always a stranger. And there’s something awful about being at the mercy of a stranger.”

— James Baldwin

368. “Hatred destroys the person who hates.”

— James Baldwin

369. “The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.”

— James Baldwin

370. “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

371. “The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains.”

— James Baldwin

372. “Love forces, at last, this humility: you cannot love if you cannot be loved, you cannot see if you cannot be seen.”

— James Baldwin

373. “But what was the point, the purpose, of my salvation if it did not permit me to behave with love toward others, no matter how they behaved toward me? What others did was their responsibility, for which they would answer when the judgment trumpet sounded.”

— James Baldwin

374. “The greatest significance of the present student generation is that it is through them that the point of view of the subjugated is finally and inexorably being expressed.”

— James Baldwin

375. “We held each other so close that we might indeed have been one body.”

— James Baldwin

376. “It’s a great city, Paris, a beautiful city––and––it was very good for me.”

— James Baldwin

377. “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

378. “Rage can only with difficulty, and never entirely, be brought under the domination of the intelligence, and therefore is not susceptible to any arguments whatsoever.”

— James Baldwin

379. “She fitted in my arms, she always had, and the shock of holding her caused me to feel that my arms had been empty since she had been away.”

— James Baldwin

380. “The first love disappears, but never goes. That ache becomes reconciliation.”

— James Baldwin

381. “The sunlight came into the room with the peacefulness one remembers from rooms in one’s early childhood – a sunlight encountered later only in one’s dreams.”

— James Baldwin

382. “It was not only colored people who praised John, since they could not, John felt, in any case really know; but white people also said it, in fact had said it first and said it still. It was when John was five years old and in the first grade that he was first noticed; and since he was noticed by an eye altogether alien and impersonal, he began to perceive, in wild uneasiness, his individual existence.”

— James Baldwin

383. “Every writer has only one story to tell, and he has to find a way of telling it until the meaning becomes clearer and clearer, until the story becomes at once more narrow and larger, more and more precise, more and more reverberating.”

— James Baldwin

384. “But just as a society must have a scapegoat, so hatred must have a symbol.”

— James Baldwin

385. “He wanted to go home and lock his door and sleep. He was tired of the troubles of real people. He wanted to get back to the people he was inventing, whose troubles he could bear.”

— James Baldwin

386. “The mind is like an object that picks up dust. The object doesn’t know, any more than the mind does, why what clings to it clings.”

— James Baldwin

387. “Experience is a private, very largely speechless affair.”

— James Baldwin

388. “People are full of surprise, even for themselves, if they have been stirred enough.”

— James Baldwin

389. “At four o’clock in the morning, when everyone is drunk enough, then extraordinary things can happen.”

— James Baldwin

390. “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. I think all theories are suspect, that the finest principles may have to be modified, or may even be pulverized by the demands of life, and that one must find, therefore, one’s own moral center and move through the world hoping that this center will guide one aright.”

— James Baldwin

391. “In Africa, he said, there was none whatever. Africans do not, in fact, believe that Christianity is any longer real for Europeans, due to the immense scaffolding with which they have covered it, and the fact that this religion has no effect whatever on their conduct.”

— James Baldwin

392. “But I know about suffering; if that helps. I know that it ends. I ain’t going to tell you no lies, like it always ends for the better. Sometimes it ends for the worse. You can suffer so bad that you can be driven to a place where you can’t ever suffer again: and that’s worse.”

— James Baldwin

393. “The breathing instruments inspire, Wake into voice each silent string, And sweep the sounding lyre! In a sadly pleasing strain, 2 Let the warbling lute complain: Let the loud trumpet sound, Till the roofs all around The shrill echoes rebound; While in more lengthen’d notes and slow, The deep, majestic, solemn organs blow. Hark! the numbers soft and clear Gently steal upon the.”

— James Baldwin

394. “Perhaps such secrets, the secrets of everyone, were only expressed when the person laboriously ragged them into the light of the world, imposed them on the world, and made them a part of the world’s experience. Without this effort, the secret place was merely a dungeon in which the person perished; without this effort, indeed, the entire world would be an uninhabitable darkness; and she saw, with a dreadful reluctance why this effort was so rare.”

— James Baldwin

395. “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

396. “Well, I may or may not be bitter, but if I were I would have good reasons for it: chief among them that American blindness, or cowardice, which allows us to pretend that life presents no reasons for being bitter.”

— James Baldwin

397. “The woman on the bed was old, her life was fading as the mist rose. She thought of her mother as already in the grave; and she would not let herself be strangled by the hands of the dead. “I’m going, Ma,” she said. “I got to go.”

— James Baldwin

398. “Heavenly witnesses are a tricky lot, to be used by whoever is closest to Heaven at the time. And legend and theology, which are designed to sanctify our fears, crimes, and aspirations, also reveal them for what they are.”

— James Baldwin

399. “You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discovered it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky.”

— James Baldwin

400. “The Americans have no sense of doom, none whatever. They do not recognize doom when they see it.”

— James Baldwin