James A. Baldwin quote: "The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment."

The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on ...
JAMES A. BALDWIN

There is a 'sanctity' involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bomb...
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening th...
JAMES A. BALDWIN

It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice c...
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imita...
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

The question of sexual dominance can exist only in the nightmare of that soul which has armed itself...
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy...
JAMES A. BALDWIN

It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connect...
JAMES A. BALDWIN

People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast...
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, fo...
JAMES A. BALDWIN

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than tha...
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Everybody's journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. ...
JAMES A. BALDWIN

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, fo...
JAMES A. 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 A. BALDWIN

No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the m...
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Fires can't be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusias...
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immu...
JAMES A. BALDWIN

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once h...
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?
JAMES A. BALDWIN

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world...
JAMES A. BALDWIN

People can cry much easier than they can change.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

You know, it's not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the w...
JAMES A. BALDWIN

The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to ex...
JAMES A. BALDWIN

It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the inde...
JAMES A. BALDWIN

If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze...
JAMES A. BALDWIN

When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

The writer's greed is appalling. He wants, or seems to want, everything and practically everybod...
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Be careful what you set your heart upon - for it will surely be yours.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything an...
JAMES A. BALDWIN

There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own e...
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to cont...
JAMES A. BALDWIN

A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

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

Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's ...
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, ...
JAMES A. BALDWIN

To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be pr...
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others. Pessimists are also people ...
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Voyagers discover that the world can never be larger than the person that is in the world; but it is...
JAMES A. BALDWIN

When a man asks himself what is meant by action he proves that he isn't a man of action. Action ...
JAMES A. 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

Tell me, he said, "What is this thing about time? Why is it better to be late than early? People are...
JAMES BALDWIN

People can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than th...
JAMES BALDWIN

With everything in me screaming No! yet the sum of me sighed Yes.
JAMES BALDWIN

I hope that nobody has ever had to look at anybody they love through glass.
JAMES BALDWIN

Only a man can see in the face of a woman the girl she was. It is a secret which can be revealed onl...
JAMES BALDWIN

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you ...
JAMES BALDWIN

The time has come to realize that the interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not ...
JAMES BALDWIN

Allegiance, after all, has to work two ways; and one can grow weary of an allegiance which is not re...
JAMES BALDWIN

People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to...
JAMES BALDWIN

[I am] someone who represents a very complex country which insists on being simple-minded. And simpl...
JAMES BALDWIN

Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
JAMES BALDWIN

Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are...
JAMES BALDWIN

Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
JAMES BALDWIN

Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young...
JAMES BALDWIN

It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the indepen...
JAMES BALDWIN

If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go.
JAMES BALDWIN

The power to define the other seals one's definition of oneself.
JAMES BALDWIN

It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, b...
JAMES BALDWIN

Our crown has already been bought and paid for. All we have to do is wear it
JAMES BALDWIN

If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own-which it is-and render impass...
JAMES BALDWIN

In my experience - and this is a very awkward way to put it, since I don't really know what the word...
JAMES BALDWIN

But to look back from the stony plain along the road which led one to that place is not at all the s...
JAMES BALDWIN

To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be JAMES BALDWIN

The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to ex...
JAMES BALDWIN

If one wishes to be instructed--not that anyone does--concerning the treacherous role that memory pl...
JAMES BALDWIN

And here I was, left with only myself to deal with. It was entirely up to me.
JAMES BALDWIN

The subtle and deadly change of heart that might occur in you would be involved with the realization...
JAMES BALDWIN

Many have given up. They stay home and watch the TV screen, living on the earnings of their parents,...
JAMES BALDWIN

I remembered my mother’s insistence that I always wear clean underwear because I might get knocked...
JAMES BALDWIN

Life is tragic simply because the earth turns, and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, f...
JAMES BALDWIN

Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that ga...
JAMES BALDWIN

The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.

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James A. Baldwin

The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.

James A. Baldwin

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