James Baldwin quotes about family & inheritance

I had discovered the weight of white people in the world. I saw that this had been for my ancestors and now would be for me an awful thing to live with and that the bitterness which had helped to kill my father could also kill me.

One wonders what on earth the first slave found to say to the first dark child he bore.

For a tradition expresses, after all, nothing more than the long and painful experience of a people; it comes out of the battle waged to maintain their integrity or, to put it more simply, out of their struggle to survive.

On the morning of the 3rd of August, we drove my father to the graveyard through a wilderness of smashed plate glass.

It seemed to me that God himself had devised, to mark my father’s end, the most sustained and brutally dissonant of codas.

Take no one’s word for anything, including mine—but trust your experience. Know whence you came. If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go.

To be loved, baby, hard, at once, and forever, to strengthen you against the loveless world.

We have not stopped trembling yet, but if we had not loved each other none of us would have survived.