Top 500 James Baldwin Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

403. “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

404. “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

405. “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

406. “Much has been written of love turning to hatred, of the heart growing cold with the death of love. It is a remarkable process. It is far more terrible than anything I have ever read about it, more terrible than anything I will ever be able to say. I.”

— James Baldwin

407. “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

408. “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

409. “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

410. “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

411. “Every society is really governed by hidden laws, by unspoken but profound assumptions on the part of the people, and ours is no exception.”

— James Baldwin

412. “Sometimes, when he was not near me, I thought, I will never let him ‘Touch’ me again. Then, when he ‘Touched’ me, I thought, it doesn’t matter, it is only the body, it will soon be over. When it was over, I lay in the dark and listened to his breathing and dreamed of the ‘Touch’ of hands, of Giovanni’s hands, or anybody’s hands, hands which would have the power to crush me and make me whole again.”

— James Baldwin

413. “The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.”

— James Baldwin

414. “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

415. “I must believe, I must believe, that the heavy grace of God, which has brought me to this point, is all that can carry me out of it.”

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

417. “If you really want to know something about solitude, become famous.”

— James Baldwin

418. “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

419. “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

420. “And then, again, I was undergoing with my father what the very young inevitability undergo with their elders: I was beginning to judge him. And the very harshness of this judgement, which broke my heart, revealed, though I could not have said it then, how much I had loved him, how that love, along with my innocence, was dying.”

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

422. “Voyagers discover that the world can never be larger than the person that is in the world; but it is impossible to foresee this, it is impossible to be warned.”

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

424. “We had our arms round each other. It was like holding in my hand some rare, exhausted, nearly doomed bird which I had miraculously happened to find.”

— James Baldwin

425. “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

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

— James Baldwin

427. “I am speaking very seriously, and this is not an overstatement: I picked cotton, I carried it to the market, I built the railroads under someone else’s whip for nothing. For nothing!”

— James Baldwin

428. “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

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

— James Baldwin

430. “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

431. “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

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

— James Baldwin

433. “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

434. “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

435. “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

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

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

440. “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

441. “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

442. “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

443. “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

444. “She was so incredibly beautiful – she seemed to be wearing the sunlight, rearranging it around her from time to time, with a movement of one hand, with a movement of her head, and with her smile – that, when she paid the man and started out of the store, I started out behind her.”

— James Baldwin

445. “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

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

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

448. “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

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

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin