787 Quotes by James Baldwin

There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.

A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled. A child cannot be taught by anyone whose demand, essentially, is that the child repudiate his experience, and all that gives him sustenance.

You must understand that your pain is trivial except insofar as you can use it to connect with other people’s pain; and insofar as you can do that with your pain, you can be released from it, and then hopefully it works the other way around too; insofar as I can tell you what it is to suffer, perhaps I can help you to suffer less.

We held each other so close that we might indeed have been one body.

Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.

Terrifying, that the loss of intimacy with one person results in the freezing over of the world, and the loss of oneself.

The romance of treason never occurred to us for the brutally simple reason that you can't betray a country you don't have. (Think about it).

Books taught me that the things that tormented me were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive. – James Baldwin, born on this day in 1924

It is really quite impossible to be affirmative about anything which one refuses to question; one is doomed to remain inarticulate about about anything which one hasn’t, by an act of the imagination, made one’s own.