James Baldwin quotes - page 3

You don't realize that you're intelligent until it gets you into trouble. (James Baldwin)

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

James Baldwin

Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark. Nobody knows what is going to happen to him from one moment to the next, or how one will bear it. This is irreducible. And it's true of everybody. Now, it is true that the nature of society is to create, among its citizens, an illusion of safety; but it is also absolutely true that the safety is always necessarily an illusion. Artists are here to disturb the peace.

James Baldwin

One writes out of one thing only - one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.

James Baldwin

People can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.

James Baldwin

Somebody," said Jacques, "your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour - and in the oddest places! - for the lack of it.

James Baldwin

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.

James Baldwin

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.

James Baldwin

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

James Baldwin

Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.

James Baldwin

When a man asks himself what is meant by action he proves that he isn't a man of action. Action is a lack of balance. In order to act you must be somewhat insane. A reasonably sensible man is satisfied with thinking. (James Baldwin)

I began plotting novels at about the time I learned to read.

James Baldwin

True rebels after all, are as rare as true lovers,and in both cases, to mistake a fever for passion can destroy one's life.

James Baldwin

You write in order to change the world ... if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.

James Baldwin

For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness.

James Baldwin

I often wonder what I'd do if there weren't any books in the world.

James Baldwin

To accept one's past – one's history – is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.

James Baldwin

When one begins looking for influences one finds them by the score. I haven't thought much about my own, not enough anyway; I hazard that the King James Bible, the rhetoric of the store-front church, something ironic and violent and perpetually understated in Negro speech - and something of Dickens' love for bravura - have something to do with me today; but I wouldn't stake my life on it. Likewise, innumerable people have helped me in many ways; but finally, I suppose, the most difficult (and most rewarding) thing in my life has been the fact that I was born a Negro and was forced, therefore, to effect some kind of truce with this reality.

James Baldwin

I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be "accepted" by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don't wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet. White people will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this - which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never - the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.

James Baldwin

I felt so aimless - like a tennis ball, bouncing, bouncing - I began to wonder where I'd land.

James Baldwin

I don't believe in this nonsense about time. Time is just common, it's like water for a fish. Everybody's in this water, nobody gets out of it, or if he does the same thing happens to him that happens to the fish, he dies. And you know what happens in this water, time? The big fish eat the little fish. That's all. The big fish eat the little fish and the ocean doesn't care. (James Baldwin)

I knew Richard [Wright] and I loved him. [... ] I was not attacking him; I was trying to clarify something for myself.

James Baldwin

I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do.

James Baldwin

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

James Baldwin

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

James Baldwin

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James Baldwin

James Baldwin - Image

Photo: Allan warren, GFDL

Occupation: American Novelist
Born: August 2, 1924
Died: December 1, 1987
Quotes count: 215
Wikipedia: James Baldwin

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