The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is ...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on ...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and th...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN The best thing about dreams is that fleeting moment, when you are between asleep and awake, when you...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be pr...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to wher...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love ...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imita...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck -- but, most of all, endurance.
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, ...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the indepen...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN If the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our b...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN Consider how hard it is to change yourself and you'll understand what little chance you have in tryi...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to cont...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN I want to be an honest man and a good writer.
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN There is a ''sanctity'' involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing on...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without mo...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN If the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our ...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN The future is like heaven - everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now.
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN Growth means change and change involves risk, stepping from the known to the unknown.
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even ...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immu...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we ...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN I am certainly convinced that it is one of the greatest impulses of mankind to arrive at something h...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self, in which case...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN Society is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that ...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once h...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN Those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN Experience, which destroys innocence, also leads one back to it.
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN Christianity has operated with an unmitigated arrogance and cruelty - necessarily, since a religion ...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN Most people... find a disorientating mismatch between the long-term nature of their liabilities and ...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a s...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's ...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN The writer's greed is appalling. He wants, or seems to want, everything and practically everybody, i...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than tha...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN If you're afraid to die, you will not be able to live.
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN Not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour--...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers.
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN Everything in life depends on how that life accepts its limits
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN Be careful what you set your heart upon - for it will surely be yours.
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN Freedom is not something that anybody can be given; Freedom is something that people take and people...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN To defend one's self against fear is simply to ensure that one will, one day, be conquered by it; fe...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come an...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly sid...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, fo...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN Everybody's journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The ...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, fo...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening th...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN Rage cannot be hidden, it can only be dissembled. This dissembling deludes the thoughtless, and stre...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the m...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN The noblest spirit is most strongly attracted by the love of glory.
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice c...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN That's the kind of ad I like, facts, facts, facts.
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN The making of an American begins at that point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other hi...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything an...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own e...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossibilit...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN Fires can't be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don't live the only life you have, you won't live so...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break forth from one another, the sea engulfs ...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one ho...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key ...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And the...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN If you're afraid to die, you will not be able to live.
JAMES BALDWIN Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and t...
JAMES BALDWIN The future is like heaven. Everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now.
JAMES BALDWIN The world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.
JAMES BALDWIN A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled. -James...
JAMES BALDWIN It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the i...
JAMES BALDWIN Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imita...
JAMES BALDWIN Nakedness has no color: this can come as news only to those who have never covered, or been covered ...
JAMES BALDWIN People can cry much easier than they can change.
JAMES BALDWIN You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you ...
JAMES BALDWIN If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more...
JAMES BALDWIN Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love ...
JAMES BALDWIN Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and th...
JAMES BALDWIN Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love ...
JAMES BALDWIN Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
JAMES BALDWIN Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy...
JAMES BALDWIN Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty o...
JAMES BALDWIN The question of sexual dominance can exist only in the nightmare of that soul which has armed itself...
JAMES BALDWIN The American ideal of sexuality appears to be rooted in the American ideal of masculinity. This idea...
JAMES BALDWIN The greatest significance of the present student generation is that it is through them that the poin...
JAMES BALDWIN If you're treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described...
JAMES BALDWIN Society is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that ...
JAMES BALDWIN People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast...
JAMES BALDWIN When the book comes out it may hurt you -- but in order for me to do it, it had to hurt me first. I ...
JAMES BALDWIN I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once h...
JAMES BALDWIN There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the m...
JAMES BALDWIN It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.
JAMES BALDWIN But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without mo...
JAMES BALDWIN Anyone who has struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
JAMES BALDWIN Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others. Pessimists are also people ...
JAMES BALDWIN I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on ...
JAMES BALDWIN We cannot discuss the state of our minorities until we first have some sense of what we are, who we ...
JAMES BALDWIN We are all androgynous, not only because we are all born of a woman impregnated by the seed of a man...
JAMES BALDWIN Fires can't be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in...
JAMES BALDWIN The paradox of education is precisely this -- that as one begins to become conscious one begins to e...
JAMES BALDWIN It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the inde...
JAMES BALDWIN A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
JAMES BALDWIN People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on...
JAMES BALDWIN The making of an American begins at the point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other his...
JAMES BALDWIN An identity is questioned only when it is menaced, as when the mighty begin to fall, or when the wre...
JAMES BALDWIN An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience...
JAMES BALDWIN You know, it's not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world...
JAMES BALDWIN The establishment of democracy on the American continent was scarcely as radical a break with the pa...
JAMES BALDWIN Be careful what you set your heart upon -- for it will surely be yours.
JAMES BALDWIN For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting...
JAMES BALDWIN The future is... black.
JAMES BALDWIN Any honest examination of the national life proves how far we are from the standard of human freedom...
JAMES BALDWIN Words like freedom, justice, democracy are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. Peop...
JAMES BALDWIN James Joyce is right about history being a nightmare-- but it may be that nightmare from which no on...
JAMES BALDWIN If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze...
JAMES BALDWIN There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own e...
JAMES BALDWIN Experience is a private, and a very largely speechless affair.
JAMES BALDWIN Experience that destroys innocents also leads one back to it.
JAMES BALDWIN Voyagers discover that the world can never be larger than the person that is in the world; but it is...
JAMES BALDWIN When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.
JAMES BALDWIN No one is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart: for his purity, by definition, ...
JAMES BALDWIN No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, fo...
JAMES BALDWIN Christianity has operated with an unmitigated arrogance and cruelty -- necessarily, since a religion...
JAMES BALDWIN There is a sanctity involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one ou...
JAMES BALDWIN Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imita...
JAMES BALDWIN It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themsel...
JAMES BALDWIN Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a s...
JAMES BALDWIN Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
JAMES BALDWIN People can cry much easier than they can change.
JAMES BALDWIN The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an immediate knowledge of its ugly si...
JAMES BALDWIN The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, ...
JAMES BALDWIN All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forc...
JAMES BALDWIN Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossibilit...
JAMES BALDWIN We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied ...
JAMES BALDWIN The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
JAMES BALDWIN Rage cannot be hidden, it can only be dissembled. This dissembling deludes the thoughtless, and stre...
JAMES BALDWIN Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocu...
JAMES BALDWIN Everything in life depends on how that life accepts its limits.
JAMES BALDWIN He may be a very nice man. But I haven't got the time to figure that out. All I know is, he's got a ...
JAMES BALDWIN The American ideal, after all, is that everyone should be as much alike as possible.
JAMES BALDWIN Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immut...
JAMES BALDWIN The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers.
JAMES BALDWIN For I am—or I was—one of those people who pride themselves in on their willpower, on their abili...
JAMES BALDWIN I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on th...
JAMES BALDWIN Anyone who had ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
JAMES BALDWIN The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, ...
JAMES BALDWIN Whose little boy are you?
JAMES BALDWIN There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for the...
JAMES BALDWIN There appears to be a vast amount of confusion on this point, but I do not know many Negroes who are...
JAMES BALDWIN To accept one's past -- one's history -- is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how...
JAMES BALDWIN Other people cannot see what I see whenever I look into your father's face, for behind your father's...
JAMES BALDWIN Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty o...
JAMES BALDWIN If you're treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are descr...
JAMES BALDWIN Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
JAMES BALDWIN I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once h...
JAMES BALDWIN There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be reall...
JAMES BALDWIN It is only because the world looks on his talent with such a frightening indifference that the arti...
JAMES BALDWIN Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others. Pessimists are also peopl...
JAMES BALDWIN A platitude is simply a truth repeated till people get tired of hearing it.
JAMES BALDWIN We take our shape, it is true, within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth; a...
JAMES BALDWIN The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
JAMES BALDWIN We go down the hall again, thank heaven, to my drink.
JAMES BALDWIN Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck -- but, most of all, endurance.
JAMES BALDWIN The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers.
JAMES BALDWIN Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where...
JAMES BALDWIN I imagine one of the reasons people cling to thier hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once h...
JAMES BALDWIN I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.
JAMES BALDWIN All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forc...
JAMES BALDWIN It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the In...
JAMES BALDWIN Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense...
JAMES BALDWIN Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossib...
JAMES BALDWIN The fact that their [the flower children's] uniforms and their jargons precisely represented the dis...
JAMES BALDWIN The first time I saw Reverend Shuttlesworth, for example, he came strolling across the parking lot o...
JAMES BALDWIN To be liberated from the stigma of blackness by embracing it is to cease, forever, one's interior ar...
JAMES BALDWIN The distance between us, and I had never thought of this before, was that they did not know this, an...
JAMES BALDWIN Afro-Americans. Which is but a wedding, however, of two confusions, an arbitrary linking of two unde...
JAMES BALDWIN People, even if they are so thoughtless as to be born black, do not come into this world merely to p...
JAMES BALDWIN I remembered his older brother, who had died in Sicily, in battle for the free world- he had barely ...
JAMES BALDWIN Incontestably, alas, most people are not, in action, worth very much; and yet, every human being is ...
JAMES BALDWIN All the western nations are caught in a lie, the lie of their pretended humanism: this means that th...
JAMES BALDWIN It must be remembered that in those great days I was considered to be an "integrationist" - this was...
JAMES BALDWIN The poet or the revolutionary is there to articulate the necessity, but until the people themselves ...
JAMES BALDWIN I was in a terrible confusion. Sometimes I thought, but this is your life. Stop fighting it. Stop fi...
JAMES BALDWIN I saw myself, sharply, as a wanderer, an adventurer, rocking through the world, unanchored.
JAMES BALDWIN People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their...
JAMES BALDWIN Somebody," said Jacques, "your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever di...
JAMES BALDWIN Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, not current a...
JAMES BALDWIN