James Baldwin quotes about disillusionment

People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception.

Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, not current as far as I know in the language of any other people, which certainly does not mean what it says but betrays a nagging suspicion that something has been misplaced.

No. It would help if I were able to feel guilty. But the end of innocence is also the end of guilt.

Much has been written of love turning to hatred, of the heart growing cold with the death of love. It is a remarkable process. It is far more terrible than anything I have ever read about it, more terrible than anything I will ever be able to say.

Americans should never come to Europe, it means they never can be happy again. What’s the good of an American who isn’t happy? Happiness was all we had.

People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.

There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.

The Americans have no sense of doom, none whatever. They do not recognize doom when they see it.

What kind of life can we have in this room?—this filthy little room. What kind of life can two men have together, anyway?

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

The Lord had given her what she said she wanted, as was often, she had found, His bewildering method of answering prayer.

There was not, after all, a great difference between the world of the North and that of the South which she had fled; there was only this difference: the North promised more. And this similarity: what it promised it did not give, and what it gave, at length and grudgingly with one hand, it took back with the other.