787 Quotes by James Baldwin

All that hatred down there," he said, "all that hatred and misery and love. It's a wonder it doesn't blow the avenue apart.

Some of us, white and black, know how great a price has already been paid to bring into existence a new consciousness, a new people, an unprecedented nation. If we know, and do nothing, we are worse than the murderers hired in our name.If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own - which it is - and render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.

Some moments in a life, and they needn't be very long or seem very important, can make up for so much in that life; can redeem, justify, that pain, that bewilderment, with which one lives, and invest one with the courage not only to endure it, but to profit from it' some moments teach one the price of human connection: if one can live with one's own pain, then one respects the pain of others, and so, briefly, but transcendentally, we can release each other from pain.

Some moments in a life, and they needn't be very long or seem very important, can make up for so much in that life; can redeem, justify, that pain, that bewilderment, with which one lives, and invest one with the courage not only to endure it, but to profit from it; some moments teach one the price of human connection: if one can live with one's own pain, then one respects the pain of others, and so, briefly, but transcendentally, we can release each other from pain.

A real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things that can be named.

The blacks have a song which says, 'I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do.' No American film, relating to blacks, can possibly incorporate this observation.

Well, I may or may not be bitter, but if I were I would have good reasons for it: chief among them that American blindness, or cowardice, which allows us to pretend that life presents no reasons for being bitter.

They knew that no one heard, that bloodless people cannot be made to bleed. So they blew what everyone had heard before, they reassured everyone that nothing terrible was happening.

My novel's about Brooklyn." "The tree? Or the kids or the murderers or the junkies?" Vivaldo swallowed. "All of them." "That's quite an assignment. And if you don't mind my saying so, it sounds just a little bit old fashioned." He put his hand before his mouth and burped. "Brooklyn's been done. And done.