787 Quotes by James Baldwin

one day I'll weep for this. One of these days I'll start to cry.

Fonny had found something that he could do, that he wanted to do, and this saved him from the death that was waiting to overtake the children of our age. Though the death took many forms, though people died early in many different ways, the death itself was very simple and the cause was simple, too: as simple as a plague: the kids had been told that they weren’t worth shit and everything they saw around them proved it.

I think she's a beautiful woman. She may not be beautiful to look at whatever the fuck that means, in this kingdom of the blind.

Every writer has only one story to tell, and he has to find a way of telling it until the meaning becomes clearer and clearer, until the story becomes at once more narrow and larger, more and more precise, more and more reverberating.

The question is really a kind of apathy and ignorance, which is the price we pay for segregation. That’s what segregation means. You don’t know what’s happening on the other side of the wall, because you don’t want to know.

I don’t know any writers who don’t drink.

he sat in an armchair, overlooking a foreign sea, still struggling to find the grace which would allow him to bear that revelation. For the meaning of revelation is that what is revealed is true, and must be borne.

It is not a racial problem. It is a problem of whether or not you're willing to look at your life and be responsible for it, and then begin to change it.

One must be careful not to take refuge in any delusion.