James Baldwin quotes about identity

Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both.

He made me think of home—perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.

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.

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.

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

I smiled and I really felt at that moment that Judas and the Saviour had met in me.

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

I did not want to be his buddy, I wanted to be his son.

But what I mean about being a woman is, we might get married now and stay married for fifty years and I might be a stranger to you every instant of that time and you might never know it.

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

And I look at my body, which is under sentence of death. It is lean, hard, and cold, the incarnation of a mystery. And I do not know what moves in this body, what this body is searching. It is trapped in my mirror as it is trapped in time and it hurries toward revelation.

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.

You have never really been here. I do not think you have ever lied to me but I know that you have never told me the truth—why?

From a great height, where the air all around me was colder than ice, I watched my body in a stranger’s arms.

I long to crack that mirror and be free. I look at my sex, my troubling sex, and wonder how it can be redeemed, how I can save it from the knife.

Even at my most candid, even when I tried hardest to give myself to him as he gave himself to me, I was holding something back.

Then something opened in my brain, a secret, noiseless door swung open, frightening me: it had not occurred to me until that instant that, in fleeing from his body, I confirmed and perpetuated his body’s power over me.

I wanted a woman to be for me a steady ground, like the earth itself, where I could always be renewed.

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

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.

Everyone had always said that John would be a preacher when he grew up, just like his father. It has been so often that John, without ever thinking about it, had come to believe it himself. Not until the morning of his fourteenth birthday did he really begin to think about it, and by then it was already too late.

It was later to become his proud testimony that he hated his sins—even as he ran toward sin, even as he sinned.