James Baldwin quotes about change

Nobody can stay in the garden of Eden.

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

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

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.

I’m ready. I’m coming. I’m on my way.

For he had made his decision. He would not be like his father, or his father’s fathers. He would have another life.

I looked at my hands and my hands were new. I looked at my feet and my feet were new. And I opened my mouth to the Lord that day and Hell won’t make me change my mind.

But ain’t no use to try to take the whole world with you. You can’t change nothing, Gabriel.

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.

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

The time has come to realize that the interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not only created a new black man, it has created a new white man, too.

If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!

And if the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.

Time catches up with kingdoms and crushes them, gets its teeth into doctrines and rends them; time reveals the foundations on which any kingdom rests, and eats at those foundations, and it destroys doctrines by proving them to be untrue.