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James Baldwin Quotes

1924–1987 United States

James Arthur Baldwin (2 August 1924 – 1 December 1987) was an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, essayist, and social critic.

United States
Academics
Activists
Essayists
Novelists

Also known as: Baldwin, James

Random James Baldwin quote

73 quotes

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

Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961)

All over Harlem, Negro boys and girls are growing into stunted maturity, trying desperately to find a place to stand; and the wonder is not that so many are ruined but that so many survive.

Notes of a Native Son (1955)

Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

I conceive of God, in fact, as a means of liberation and not a means to control others.

Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961)

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.

Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961)

Nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.

Giovanni's Room (1956)

One must say Yes to life, and embrace it wherever it is found — and it is found in terrible places.

'Maybe everything bad that happens to you makes you weaker, and so you can stand less and less.'

Giovanni's Room (1956)

At the rate things are going here, all of Africa will be free before we can get a lousy cup of coffee.

Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961)

I am beginning to feel like part of a travelling circus.

Giovanni's Room (1956)

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

The Creative Process (1962)

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.

Notes of a Native Son (1955)

Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.

Experience is a private, and a very largely speechless affair.

Notes of a Native Son (1955)

Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have.

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.

Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961)

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them. They must, they have no other models.

Nobody Knows My Name (1961)

White is a metaphor for power, and that is simply a way of describing Chase Manhattan Bank.

I am Not Your Negro (2017)

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

Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961)

It is true that two wrongs don't make a right, as we love to point out to the people we have wronged. But one wrong doesn't make a right, either.

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: James Baldwin (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.