73 quotes
You've got to tell the world how to treat you. If the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are in trouble.
The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961)
Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.
The Fire Next Time (1963)
People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
Notes of a Native Son (1955)
Words like "freedom," "justice," "democracy" are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous and, above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply.
Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important.
An interview with James Baldwin (1961)
A place where I can find out again—where I am—and what I must do. A place where I can stop and do nothing in order to start again.
'I felt so aimless — like a tennis ball, bouncing, bouncing — I began to wonder where I'd land.'
Giovanni's Room (1956)
She is smiling and her eyes are kind but now the smile is purely social
Giovanni's Room (1956)
But people can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts... Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.
I, for example, do not bring down property values when I move in. You bring them down when you move out.
We Can Change the Country (1963)
There is a reason, after all, that some people wish to colonize the moon, and others dance before it as before an ancient friend.
No Name in the Street (1972)
I can't be a pessimist because I'm alive.
Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex. You thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did.
Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961)
Close up, the person's imperfections matter, but from far away, you see your own.
Just Above My Head (1979)
Despair is a sin. I believe that. It is easy to be bleak about the human race, but there are people who have proved to me that we can be better than we are.
Everyone wishes to be loved, but, in the event, nearly no one can bear it. Everyone desires love but also finds it impossible to believe that he deserves it.
Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (1968)
In the church in which I was raised you were supposed to bear witness to the truth. Now, later on, you wonder what in the world the truth is, but you do know what a lie is.
Passion is terrifying, it can rock you, change you, bring your head under, as when a wind rises from the bottom of the sea, and you're out there in the craft of your mortality, alone.
Just Above My Head (1979)
The betrayal of a belief is not the same thing as ceasing to believe. If this were not so there would be no moral standards in the world at all.
Notes of a Native Son (1955)