James Baldwin quotes

These, God’s ministers, had indeed grown fat, and their dress was rich and various. They had been in the field so long that they did not tremble before God any more.

And something moved in John’s body which was not John. He was invaded, set at naught, possessed.

The darkness and silence of the church pressed on him, cold as judgment, and the voices crying from the window might have been crying from another world.

I don’t want to sound foolish. But, just remember, love brought you here. If you trusted love this far, don’t panic now.

It’s a miracle to realize that somebody loves you.

Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.

The truth of a case doesn’t matter. What matters is – who wins.

Time could not be bought. The only coin time accepted was life.

I know about suffering; if that helps. I know that it ends. I ain’t going to tell you no lies, like it always ends for the better. Sometimes it ends for the worse. You can suffer so bad that you can be driven to a place where you can’t ever suffer again: and that’s worse.

I hope that nobody has ever had to look at anybody they love through glass.

I guess it can’t be too often that two people can laugh and make love, too, make love because they are laughing, laugh because they’re making love. The love and the laughter come from the same place: but not many people go there.

But they are wrong to be ashamed. The people responsible for these jails should be ashamed.

They looked at us as though we were zebras – and, you know, some people like zebras and some people don’t. But nobody ever asks the zebra.

We don’t know enough about ourselves. I think it’s better to know that you don’t know, that way you can grow with the mystery as the mystery grows in you.

One of the most terrible, most mysterious things about a life is that a warning can be heeded only in retrospect: too late.

When two people love each other, when they really love each other, everything that happens between them has something of a sacramental air.

The world sees what it wishes to see, or, when the chips are down, what you tell it to see: it does not wish to see who, or what, or why you are.

It is not that he gives up hope, but that he ceases clinging to it.

And Fonny’s body was a total mystery to me – the body of one’s lover always is, no matter how well one gets to know it: it is the changing envelope which contains the gravest mystery of one’s life.

Despair can make one monstrous, but it can also make one noble: and here these children are, in the arena, up for grabs.

Baby. Baby. Baby. I love you. And I’m going to build us a table and a whole lot of folks going to be eating off it for a long, long time to come.

You can’t say that. That means you can’t really say anything. Trouble means you’re alone.

Fathers and sons are one thing. Fathers and daughters are another.

He was the most beautiful person I had seen in all my life.

I don’t know, sir. But it’s old enough to know who you love.