James Baldwin quotes about loneliness

Somebody, your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour—and in the oddest places!—for the lack of it.

You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.

You play it safe long enough, and you’ll end up trapped in your own dirty body, forever and forever and forever—like me.

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.

Giovanni looked at me. And this look made me feel that no one in my life had ever looked at me directly before.

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.

It’s like putting an electric plug in a dead socket. Touch, but no contact. All touch, but no contact and no light.

And no matter what I was doing, another me sat in my belly, absolutely cold with terror over the question of my life.

I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.

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 looked at Giovanni’s face, which did not help me. He belonged to this strange city, which did not belong to me.

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.

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

At length, she lay beside him like a burden laid down at evening which must be picked up once more in the morning.

She was descending with Richard to the sea. She would have to climb back up alone, but she did not know this then.

I was down in the valley, I was by myself down there. I won’t never forget. May God forget me if I forget.

The darkness and silence of the church pressed on him, cold as judgment, and the voices crying from the window might have been crying from another world.

You can’t say that. That means you can’t really say anything. Trouble means you’re alone.

Now, we knew that nobody loved us: or, now, we knew who did. Whoever loved us was not here.

No matter what you may understand, and really understand, and no matter what you may tell yourself, if no one comes to see you, you are in very bad trouble. And trouble, here, means danger.

Through this deliberate isolation, through lack of numbers, and above all through his own overwhelming need to be, as it were, forgotten, the American Negro in Paris is very nearly the invisible man.

The universe, which is not merely the stars and the moon and the planets, flowers, grass, and trees, but other people, has evolved no terms for your existence, has made no room for you, and if love will not swing wide the gates, no other power will or can.