Top 100

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

James Baldwin Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “There’s no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it.”
James Baldwin Quote: “It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody.”
James Baldwin Quote: “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 Quote: “The Americans have no sense of doom, none whatever. They do not recognize doom when they see it.”
James Baldwin Quote: “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 Quote: “We take our shape within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth.”
James Baldwin Quote: “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 Quote: “I wish I had heard him more clearly: an oblique confession is always a plea.”
James Baldwin Quote: “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 Quote: “There is a fearful splendor in absolute desolation.”
James Baldwin Quote: “This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you should perish.”
James Baldwin Quote: “But white Americans do not believe in death, and this is why the darkness of my skin so intimidates them.”
James Baldwin Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “You can not describe anything without betraying your point of view, your aspirations, your fears, your hopes. Everything.”
James Baldwin Quote: “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 Quote: “Observing that, from this height, the city which had been so dark as he walked through it seemed to be on fire.”
James Baldwin Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “There is a ‘sanctity’ involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.”
James Baldwin Quote: “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 Quote: “When you’re writing you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know.”
James Baldwin Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “I stared at absurd Paris, which was as cluttered now, under the scalding sun, as the landscape of my heart.”
James Baldwin Quote: “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 Quote: “You face reality, not the lights. The lights go off as quickly as they come on.”
James Baldwin Quote: “A real writer is always shifting and changing and searching.”
James Baldwin Quote: “The journey to the grave is already begun, the journey to corruption is, always, already, half over.”
James Baldwin Quote: “Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.”
James Baldwin Quote: “And: the only way anything ever gets done is when you make up your mind to do it.”
James Baldwin Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “The way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.”
James Baldwin Quote: “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 Quote: “I thought she would be fun to have fun with.”
James Baldwin Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “A writer has to take all the risks of putting down what he sees.”
James Baldwin Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “If your countrymen think that privacy is a crime, so much the worse for your country.”
James Baldwin Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “You might feel different out there, with all the sunshine and oranges and all.”
PREV 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 NEXT
Strong Quotes
Real Quotes
Book Quotes
Firsts Quotes
Reading Quotes
Quotes About Stories
Romance Quotes
Forgiveness Quotes
Self Improvement Quotes
Country Quotes
Quotes About Believing
Betrayal Quotes

Beautiful Wallpapers and Images

We hope you enjoyed our collection of 500 free pictures with James Baldwin Quotes.

All of the images on this page were created with QuoteFancy Studio.

Use QuoteFancy Studio to create high-quality images for your desktop backgrounds, blog posts, presentations, social media, videos, posters and more.

Learn more