James Baldwin quotes about memory & the past

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

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

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

Nobody can stay in the garden of Eden.

No matter how it seems now, I must confess: I loved him. I do not think that I will ever love anyone like that again.

Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden, I don’t know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword.

I thought only, One day I’ll weep for this. One of these days I’ll start to cry.

It was like holding in my hand some rare, exhausted, nearly doomed bird which I had miraculously happened to find.

It became, in a way, every room I had ever been in and every room I find myself in hereafter will remind me of Giovanni’s room.

To remember it so clearly, so painfully tonight tells me that I have never for an instant truly forgotten it.

I remember that life in that room seemed to be occurring beneath the sea, time flowed past indifferently above us, hours and days had no meaning. In the beginning our life together held a joy and amazement which was newborn every day.

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

Ah, yes, and you will certainly hear it again. It is one of those songs that somebody, somewhere, will always be singing.

Perhaps I didn’t know it then. I only knew I had to get out of Giovanni’s room.

But he was to find, as the prophets had found, that the whole earth became a prison for him who fled before the Lord. There was peace nowhere. In every church he entered, his sin had gone before him.

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

Then John knew that a curse was renewed from moment to moment, from father to son. Time was indifferent, like snow and ice; but the heart, crazed wanderer in the driving waste, carried the curse for ever.

Yes, the darkness hummed with murder: the body in the water, the body in the fire, the body on the tree.

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

One of the most terrible, most mysterious things about a life is that a warning can be heeded only in retrospect: too late.

We had not seen the moment. But the moment had seen us, from a long ways off – sat there, waiting for us – utterly free, the moment, playing cards, hurling thunderbolts, cracking spines, tremendously waiting for us, dawdling home from school, to keep our appointment.

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.

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

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.

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.