James Baldwin quotes

Nobody can stay in the garden of Eden.

But people can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.

Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, not current as far as I know in the language of any other people, which certainly does not mean what it says but betrays a nagging suspicion that something has been misplaced.

With everything in me screaming No! yet the sum of me sighed Yes.

No. It would help if I were able to feel guilty. But the end of innocence is also the end of guilt.

No matter how it seems now, I must confess: I loved him. I do not think that I will ever love anyone like that again.

And these nights were being acted out under a foreign sky, with no-one to watch, no penalties attached—it was this last fact which was our undoing, for nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.

Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden, I don’t know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword.

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.

Americans should never come to Europe, it means they never can be happy again. What’s the good of an American who isn’t happy? Happiness was all we had.

Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford, and you are not that young any more.

You play it safe long enough, and you’ll end up trapped in your own dirty body, forever and forever and forever—like me.

With this fearful intimation there opened in me a hatred for Giovanni which was as powerful as my love and which was nourished by the same roots.

I smiled and I really felt at that moment that Judas and the Saviour had met in me.

People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.

I did not want to be his buddy, I wanted to be his son.

There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.

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

And I felt myself flow toward him, as a river rushes when the ice breaks up.

But what I mean about being a woman is, we might get married now and stay married for fifty years and I might be a stranger to you every instant of that time and you might never know it.

You are the one who keeps talking about what I want. But I have only been talking about who I want.

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

If you cannot love me, I will die. Before you came I wanted to die, I have told you many times. It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody.

You love your purity, you love your mirror—you are just like a little virgin, you walk around with your hands in front of you as though you had some precious metal, gold, silver, rubies, maybe diamonds down there between your legs!

What kind of life can we have in this room?—this filthy little room. What kind of life can two men have together, anyway?