James Baldwin

If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!

The writer’s greed is appalling. He wants, or seems to want, everything and practically everybody; in another sense, and at the same time, he needs no one at all.

This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.

His mother, her eyes raised to heaven, hands arched before her, moving, made real for John that patience, that endurance, that long suffering, which he had read of in the Bible and found so hard to imagine.

I am certainly convinced that it is one of the greatest impulses of mankind to arrive at something higher than a natural state.

Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel.

We take our shape, it is true, within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth; and yet it is precisely through our dependence on this reality that we are most endlessly betrayed.

[I]t had been from the first her great mistake—to meet him, to marry him, to love him as she so bitterly had. Looking at his face, it sometimes came to her that all women had been cursed from the cradle; all, in one fashion or another, being given the same cruel destiny, born to suffer the weight of men.

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.

Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law.

The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did—which was to hide.

[W]hat frightened him, and kept him more than ever on his knees, was the knowledge that, once having fallen, nothing would be easier than to fall again. Having possessed Esther, the carnal man awoke, seeing the possibility of conquest everywhere.

Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always seem untimely.

There exists among the intolerably degraded the perverse and powerful desire to force into the arena of the actual those fantastic crimes of which they have been accused, achieving their vengeance and their own destruction through making the nightmare real.

There was no room in God’s army for the coward heart, no crown awaiting him who put mother or father, sister or brother, sweetheart or friend above God’s will. Let the church cry amen to this!

To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.

A ghetto can be improved in one way only: out of existence.

People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.

Our dehumanization of the Negro then is indivisible from our dehumanization of ourselves; the loss of our own identity is the price we pay for our annulment of his.

It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.

An American Negro, however deep his sympathies, or however bright his rage, ceases to be simply a black man when he faces a black man from Africa.

John did not remember very clearly the first time she had gone, to have Roy; folks said that he had cried and carried on the whole time his mother was away; he remembered only enough to be afraid every time her belly began to swell, knowing that each time the swelling began it would not end until she was taken from him, to come back with a stranger.

All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.

The making of an American begins at that point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land.

No one can possibly know what is about to happen it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.

Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy.

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

To defend one's self against fear is simply to ensure that one will, one day, be conquered by it fears must be faced.

Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.

The future is like heaven, everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now.

Not everything that is faced can be changed.

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

Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.

It is said that the camera cannot lie, but rarely do we allow it to do anything else, since the camera sees what you point it at: the camera sees what you want it to see.

The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.

Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck -- but, most of all, endurance.