Top 500 James Baldwin Quotes (2023 Update)
Page 9 of 10

401. “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

402. “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

403. “There’s no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it.”

— James Baldwin

404. “It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody.”

— James Baldwin

405. “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

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

— James Baldwin

407. “Furthermore, it is now absolutely clear that white people are a minority in the world – so severe a minority that they now look rather more like an invention – and that they cannot possibly hope to rule it any longer. If this is so, why is it not also possible that they achieved their original dominance by stealth and cunning and bloodshed and in opposition to the will of Heaven, and not, as they claim, by Heaven’s will?”

— James Baldwin

408. “We take our shape within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth.”

— James Baldwin

409. “People who cling to their illusions find it difficult, if not impossible, to learn anything worth learning: a people under the necessity of creating themselves must examine everything, and soak up learning the way the roots of a tree soak up water.”

— James Baldwin

410. “I wish I had heard him more clearly: an oblique confession is always a plea.”

— James Baldwin

411. “But it is part of the business of the writer – as I see it – to examine attitudes, to go beneath the surface, to tap the source.”

— James Baldwin

412. “There is a fearful splendor in absolute desolation.”

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

415. “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

416. “Incontestably, alas, most people are not, in action, worth very much; and yet, every human being is an unprecedented miracle. One tries to treat them as the miracles they are, while trying to protect oneself against the disasters they’ve become.”

— James Baldwin

417. “The question of identity is a question involving the most profound panic – a terror as primary as the nightmare of the mortal fall.”

— James Baldwin

418. “You can not describe anything without betraying your point of view, your aspirations, your fears, your hopes. Everything.”

— James Baldwin

419. “I had to get out of there for my face showed too much, the war in my body was dragging me down. My feet refused to carry me over to him again. The wind of my life was blowing me away.”

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

421. “All the western nations are caught in a lie, the lie of their pretended humanism: this means that their history has no moral justification, and that the West has no moral authority.”

— James Baldwin

422. “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

423. “I wish to God I may die if I don’t love you. There ain’t no sky above us if I don’t love you.”

— James Baldwin

424. “There is a ‘sanctity’ involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.”

— James Baldwin

425. “In any event, the sloppy and fatuous nature of American good will can never be relied upon to deal with hard problems. These have been dealt with, when they have been dealt with at all, out of necessity – and in political terms, anyway, necessity means concessions made in order to stay on top.”

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

427. “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

428. “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

429. “I stared at absurd Paris, which was as cluttered now, under the scalding sun, as the landscape of my heart.”

— James Baldwin

430. “But that battered word, truth, having made its appearance here, confronts one immediately with a series of riddles and has, moreover, since so many gospels are preached, the unfortunate tendency to make one belligerent.”

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

433. “The journey to the grave is already begun, the journey to corruption is, always, already, half over.”

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

435. “And: the only way anything ever gets done is when you make up your mind to do it.”

— James Baldwin

436. “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

437. “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

438. “The way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.”

— James Baldwin

439. “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

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

— James Baldwin

441. “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

442. “But art and ideas come out of the passion and torment of experience: it is impossible to have a real relationship to the first if one’s aim is to be protected from the second.”

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

444. “But, in the end, it is the threat of universal extinction hanging over all the world today that changes, totally and forever, the nature of reality and brings into devastating question the true meaning of man’s history. We human beings now have the power to exterminate ourselves; this seems to be the entire sum of our achievement.”

— James Baldwin

445. “We are in the middle of an immense metamorphosis here, a metamorphosis which will, it is devoutly to be hoped, rob us of our myths and give us our history, which will destroy our attitudes and give us back our personalities. The mass culture, in the meantime, can only reflect our chaos: and perhaps we had better remember that this chaos contains life – and a great transforming energy.”

— James Baldwin

446. “The dead man mattered, the new life mattered; blackness and whiteness did not matter; to believe that they did was to acquiesce in one’s own destruction. Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law.”

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

448. “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

449. “It’s astounding the first time you realize that a stranger has a body – the realization that he has a body makes him a stranger. It means that you have a body, too. You will live with this forever, and it will spell out the language of your life.”

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin