Top 500 James Baldwin Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “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

402. “The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through.”

— James Baldwin

403. “Ages ago, in another city, on another bus, I sat so at the windows, looking outward, inventing for each flying face which trapped my brief attention some life, some destiny, in which I played a part. I was looking for some whisper, or promise, of my possible salvation. But it seemed to me that morning that my ancient self had been dreaming the most dangerous dream of all.”

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

405. “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

406. “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

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

— James Baldwin

408. “In the United States, violence and heroism have been made synonymous except when it comes to blacks, and.”

— James Baldwin

409. “Hatred destroys the person who hates.”

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

411. “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

412. “There they stood, in twos and threes and fours, in their Cub Scout uniforms and with their Cub Scout faces, totally unprepared, as is the way with American he-men, for anything that could not be settled with a club or a fist or a gun.”

— James Baldwin

413. “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

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

— James Baldwin

415. “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

416. “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

417. “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

418. “If a society permits one portion of its citizenry to be menaced or destroyed, then, very soon, no one in that society is safe. The forces thus released in the people can never be held in check, but run their devouring course, destroying the very foundations which it was imagined they would save.”

— James Baldwin

419. “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

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

— James Baldwin

421. “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

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

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

426. “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

427. “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

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

— James Baldwin

429. “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

430. “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

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

— James Baldwin

432. “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

433. “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

434. “The burden of his salvation seemed to be on me and I could not endure it.”

— James Baldwin

435. “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

436. “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

437. “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

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

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

440. “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

441. “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

442. “The black man in our midst carried murder in his heart, he wanted vengeance. We carried murder too, we wanted peace.”

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

444. “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

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

— James Baldwin

446. “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

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

— James Baldwin

448. “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

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

— James Baldwin

450. “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