Skip to content

This may be why we appear to learn absolutely nothing from experience, or may, in other words, account for our incoherence: memory does not require that we reconstitute the event, but that we justify it.

— James Baldwin Just Above My Head (1979)

Another quote →

Topics

Memory

More quotes by James Baldwin

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)

All James Baldwin quotes →

You may also like

Women and elephants never forget an injury.

Saki Reginald (1904)

Man should possess an infinite appetite for life. It should be self-evident to him, all the time, that life is superb, glorious, endlessly rich, infinitely desirable.

Colin Wilson The Philosopher's Stone (1969)

To live in hearts we leave behind
Is not to die.

Thomas Campbell

In the practical use of our intellect, forgetting is as important a function as recollecting.

William James The Principles of Psychology (1890)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: James Baldwin (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.