James Baldwin quotes

And I look at my body, which is under sentence of death. It is lean, hard, and cold, the incarnation of a mystery. And I do not know what moves in this body, what this body is searching. It is trapped in my mirror as it is trapped in time and it hurries toward revelation.

Giovanni looked at me. And this look made me feel that no one in my life had ever looked at me directly before.

I stared at absurd Paris, which was as cluttered now, under the scalding sun, as the landscape of my heart. I wondered what I was going to do.

I thought only, One day I’ll weep for this. One of these days I’ll start to cry.

The big fish eat the little fish and the ocean doesn’t care.

Perhaps he is a fool and a coward but almost everybody is one or the other and most people are both.

It was like holding in my hand some rare, exhausted, nearly doomed bird which I had miraculously happened to find.

I was glad. I was utterly, hopelessly, horribly glad. I knew I could do nothing whatever to stop the ferocious excitement which had burst in me like a storm.

This old whore, Paris, as she turns in bed, is very moving.

It’s like putting an electric plug in a dead socket. Touch, but no contact. All touch, but no contact and no light.

And no matter what I was doing, another me sat in my belly, absolutely cold with terror over the question of my life.

And I resented this: resented being called an American (and resented resenting it) because it seemed to make me nothing more than that, whatever that was; and I resented being called not an American because it seemed to make me nothing.

I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.

What a long way, I thought, I’ve come—to be destroyed!

You have never really been here. I do not think you have ever lied to me but I know that you have never told me the truth—why?

From a great height, where the air all around me was colder than ice, I watched my body in a stranger’s arms.

I long to crack that mirror and be free. I look at my sex, my troubling sex, and wonder how it can be redeemed, how I can save it from the knife.

It became, in a way, every room I had ever been in and every room I find myself in hereafter will remind me of Giovanni’s room.

He held my face between his hands and I suppose such tenderness has scarcely ever produced such terror as I then felt.

The question is banal but one of the real troubles with living is that living is so banal.

People are full of dirty words. The only time they do not use them, most people I mean, is when they are describing something dirty.

To remember it so clearly, so painfully tonight tells me that I have never for an instant truly forgotten it.

I looked at Giovanni’s face, which did not help me. He belonged to this strange city, which did not belong to me.

Even at my most candid, even when I tried hardest to give myself to him as he gave himself to me, I was holding something back.

The need to act was like a fever in me, the only act possible was the act of love.