787 Quotes by James Baldwin

He had been bruised, so to speak, so badly that the eyes of strangers lacerated him like salt.

Sin is the only heritage of the natural man...

The American ideal, after all, is that everyone should be as much alike as possible.

The Americans have no sense of doom, none whatever. They do not recognize doom when they see it.

In any event, the sloppy and fatuous nature of American good will can never be relied upon to deal with hard problems. These have been dealt with, when they have been dealt with at all, out of necessity—and in political terms, anyway, necessity means concessions made in order to stay on top.

For the horrors of the American Negro's life there has been almost no language.... And, in fact, the truth about the black man, as a historical entity and as a human being, has been hidden from him, deliberately and cruelly; the power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.

People evolve a language in order to describe and thus control their circumstances, or in order not to be submerged by a reality that they cannot articulate.

I told myself all sorts of lies, standing there at the bar, but I could not move. And this was partly because I knew that it did not really matter anymore; it did not even matter if I never spoke to Giovanni again; for they had become visible, as visible as the wafers on the shirt of the flaming princess, they stormed all over me, my awakening, my insistent possibilities.

To begin with, the room was not large enough for two. It looked out on a small courtyard. 'Looked out' means only that the room had two windows, against which the courtyard malevolently pressed, encroaching day by day, as though it had confused itself with a jungle.