James Baldwin quotes

The poor are always crossing the Sahara. And the lawyers and bonds-men and all that crowd circle around the poor, exactly like vultures.

It’s astounding the first time you realize that a stranger has a body – the realization that he has a body makes him a stranger. It means that you have a body, too. You will live with this forever, and it will spell out the language of your life.

Maybe I’d feel different if I had done something and got caught. But I didn’t do nothing. They were just playing with me, man, because they could.

Remember, Tish, after all, it isn’t very much of a case. If Fonny were white, it wouldn’t be a case at all.

These captive men are the hidden price for a hidden and dreadful terror: the righteous must be able to locate the damned.

We had not seen the moment. But the moment had seen us, from a long ways off – sat there, waiting for us – utterly free, the moment, playing cards, hurling thunderbolts, cracking spines, tremendously waiting for us, dawdling home from school, to keep our appointment.

Something hardens in him, something changes forever, his tears freeze in his belly. But he has leapt from the promontory of despair. He is fighting for his life.

Fonny is working on the wood, on the stone, whistling, smiling. And, from far away, but coming nearer, the baby cries and cries and cries and cries and cries and cries and cries and cries, cries like it means to wake the dead.

Daughter. In this world, terrible things happen to you, and we can all do some terrible things.

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.

You got to think about that baby. You got to hold on to that baby, don’t care what else happens or don’t happen. You got to do that. Can’t nobody else do that for you.

They were so free that they believed in nothing; and didn’t realize that this illusion was their only truth and that they were doing exactly as they had been told.

I got two things in my life, man – I got my wood and stone and I got Tish. If I lose them, I’m lost. I know that.

He stands, and raises his fist. He smiles, and stands there for a moment, looking me dead in the eye. Something travels from him to me, it is love and courage.

But you don’t know – the worst thing, man, the worst thing – is that they can make you so fucking scared. Scared, man. Scared.

We were to spend a long time in this room: our lives.

Now, we knew that nobody loved us: or, now, we knew who did. Whoever loved us was not here.

No matter what you may understand, and really understand, and no matter what you may tell yourself, if no one comes to see you, you are in very bad trouble. And trouble, here, means danger.

Okay. But that’s our flesh and blood, baby: our flesh and blood. I don’t know how we going to do it. I just know we have to do it.

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 imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.

Joyce is right about history being a nightmare—but it may be the nightmare from which no one can awaken. People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.

This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.

One writes out of one thing only—one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.