James Baldwin quotes

Then something opened in my brain, a secret, noiseless door swung open, frightening me: it had not occurred to me until that instant that, in fleeing from his body, I confirmed and perpetuated his body’s power over me.

I suppose they will come for him early in the morning, perhaps just before dawn, so that the last thing Giovanni will ever see will be that grey, lightless sky over Paris, beneath which we stumbled homeward together so many desperate and drunken mornings.

And at moments like this I felt that we were merely enduring and committing the longer and lesser and more perpetual murder.

Why was too black for the newsprint to carry and too deep for Giovanni to tell.

I wanted a woman to be for me a steady ground, like the earth itself, where I could always be renewed.

I remember that life in that room seemed to be occurring beneath the sea, time flowed past indifferently above us, hours and days had no meaning. In the beginning our life together held a joy and amazement which was newborn every day.

Giovanni knew that I was going to leave him but he did not dare accuse me for fear of being corroborated. I did not dare tell him.

Life in that room seemed to be occurring underwater, as I say, and it is certain that I underwent a sea-change there.

Ah, yes, and you will certainly hear it again. It is one of those songs that somebody, somewhere, will always be singing.

I hoped to burn out, through Hella, my image of Giovanni and the reality of his touch—I hoped to drive out fire with fire.

But it was not the same, something was gone; the astonishment, the power, and the joy were gone, the peace was gone.

It’s funny, I’ve never felt anyplace was home before.

There is something fantastic in the spectacle I now present to myself of having run so far, so hard, across the ocean even, only to find myself brought up short once more before the bulldog in my own backyard—the yard, in the meantime, having grown smaller and the bulldog bigger.

Me, I want to escape, je veuz m’evader—this dirty world, this dirty body. I never wish to make love again with anything more than the body.

Beneath the joy, of course, was anguish and beneath the amazement was fear; but they did not work themselves to the beginning until our high beginning was aloes on our tongues.

For this was not a matter of habit or circumstances or temperament; it was a matter of punishment and grief.

I was to destroy this room and give to Giovanni a new and better life.

Perhaps I didn’t know it then. I only knew I had to get out of Giovanni’s room.

This was not the garbage of Paris, which would have been anonymous: this was Giovanni’s regurgitated life.

Love is as strong as death, as deep as the grave.

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.

Perhaps she had lost her love because she had not, in the end, believed in it enough.

Everyone had always said that John would be a preacher when he grew up, just like his father. It has been so often that John, without ever thinking about it, had come to believe it himself. Not until the morning of his fourteenth birthday did he really begin to think about it, and by then it was already too late.

And God did not hear the prayers of the fearful, for the hearts of the fearful held no belief. Such prayers could rise no higher that the lips that uttered them.

It was he who, unforgivably, taught her that there are people in the world for whom ‘coming along’ is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.