787 Quotes by James Baldwin

But she saw nothing in my eyes—she stared at me as though I had made a long journey on a white charger all the way to her prison house.

To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.

You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.

He wanted me to come home--to come home, as he said, and settle down, and whenever he said that I thought of the sediment at the bottom of a stagnant pond.

There is never a time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment, the time is always now.

Maybe everything bad that happens to you makes you weaker," said Giovanni, as though he had not heard me, "and so you can stand less and less.

One of these days," he said. "Everything bad will happen—one of these days.

There is often something beautiful, there is always something awful, in the spectacle of a a person who has lost one of his faculties, a faculty he never questioned until it was gone, and who struggles to recover it. Yet people remain people, on crutches or indeed on deathbeds....

Ultimately, the artist and the revolutionary function as they function, and pay whatever dues they must pay behind it because they are both possessed by a vision, and they do not so much follow this vision as find themselves driven by it. Otherwise, they could never endure, much less embrace, the lives they are compelled to lead.