James Baldwin quotes about hope

It’s funny, I’ve never felt anyplace was home before.

I was to destroy this room and give to Giovanni a new and better life.

For his drifting soul was anchored in the love of God; in the rock that endured for ever. The light and the darkness had kissed each other, and were married now, for ever, in the life and the vision of John’s soul.

I’m ready. I’m coming. I’m on my way.

Ain’t nothing but the love of God can make the darkness light.

Their singing caused him to believe in the presence of the Lord; indeed, it was no longer a question of belief, because they made that presence real.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

What time will bring Americans is at last their own identity. It is on this dangerous voyage and in the same boat that the American Negro will make peace with himself and with the voiceless many thousands gone before him.

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.

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!

But in our time, as in every time, the impossible is the least that one can demand—and one is, after all, emboldened by the spectacle of human history in general, and American Negro history in particular, for it testifies to nothing less than the perpetual achievement of the impossible.