James Baldwin quotes about mortality

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.

No. It would help if I were able to feel guilty. But the end of innocence is also the end of guilt.

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

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

If you cannot love me, I will die. Before you came I wanted to die, I have told you many times. It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody.

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.

The big fish eat the little fish and the ocean doesn’t care.

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

What a long way, I thought, I’ve come—to be destroyed!

I suppose they will come for him early in the morning, perhaps just before dawn, so that the last thing Giovanni will ever see will be that grey, lightless sky over Paris, beneath which we stumbled homeward together so many desperate and drunken mornings.

And at moments like this I felt that we were merely enduring and committing the longer and lesser and more perpetual murder.

Why was too black for the newsprint to carry and too deep for Giovanni to tell.

For this was not a matter of habit or circumstances or temperament; it was a matter of punishment and grief.

This was not the garbage of Paris, which would have been anonymous: this was Giovanni’s regurgitated life.

Love is as strong as death, as deep as the grave.

God’s got your number, knows where you live, death’s got a warrant out for you.

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.

Men spoke of how the heart broke up, but never spoke of how the soul hung speechless in the pause, the void, the terror between the living and the dead; how, all garments rent and cast aside, the naked soul passed over the very mouth of Hell.

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

Listen. God is talking.

Broadway: the way that led to death was broad, and many could be found thereon; but narrow was the way that led to life eternal, and few there were who found it.

Ten years. Their battle never ended; they never bought a home. He died in France.

Time could not be bought. The only coin time accepted was life.

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.