James Baldwin quotes about identity

He knew only—and now, looking at his mother, he knew that he could never tell it—that the heart was a fearful place.

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

What these children hear ain’t going to do them near as much harm as what they see.

It was his hatred and his intelligence that he cherished, the one feeding the other.

And something moved in John’s body which was not John. He was invaded, set at naught, possessed.

Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.

They looked at us as though we were zebras – and, you know, some people like zebras and some people don’t. But nobody ever asks the zebra.

We don’t know enough about ourselves. I think it’s better to know that you don’t know, that way you can grow with the mystery as the mystery grows in you.

The world sees what it wishes to see, or, when the chips are down, what you tell it to see: it does not wish to see who, or what, or why you are.

I don’t know, sir. But it’s old enough to know who you love.

It’s astounding the first time you realize that a stranger has a body – the realization that he has a body makes him a stranger. It means that you have a body, too. You will live with this forever, and it will spell out the language of your life.

The mind is like an object that picks up dust. The object doesn’t know, any more than the mind does, why what clings to it clings.

They were so free that they believed in nothing; and didn’t realize that this illusion was their only truth and that they were doing exactly as they had been told.

I got two things in my life, man – I got my wood and stone and I got Tish. If I lose them, I’m lost. I know that.

I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.

Joyce is right about history being a nightmare—but it may be the nightmare from which no one can awaken. People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.

One writes out of one thing only—one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.

The story of the Negro in America is the story of America—or, more precisely, it is the story of Americans. It is not a very pretty story: the story of a people is never very pretty.

There is not a Negro alive who does not have this rage in his blood—one has the choice, merely, of living with it consciously or surrendering to it.

I want to be an honest man and a good writer.

From the vantage point of Europe he discovers his own country.

But our humanity is our burden, our life; we need not battle for it; we need only to do what is infinitely more difficult—that is, accept it.

Our passion for categorization, life neatly fitted into pegs, has led to an unforeseen, paradoxical distress; confusion, a breakdown of meaning. Those categories which were meant to define and control the world for us have boomeranged us into chaos; in which limbo we whirl, clutching the straws of our definitions.

It must be remembered that the oppressed and the oppressor are bound together within the same society; they accept the same criteria, they share the same beliefs, they both alike depend on the same reality.