787 Quotes by James Baldwin

It’s funny about people. Just before something happens, you almost know what it is. You do know what it is, I believe. You just haven’t had the time—and now you won’t have the time—to say it to yourself.

I don't know, now, when I first looked at Hella and found her stale, found her body uninteresting, her presence grating. It seemed to happen all at once—I suppose that only means that it had been happening for a long time.

...love brought you here. If you trusted love this far, don't panic now.

Since we live in an age in which silence is not only criminal but suicidal, I have been making as much noise as I can, here in Europe, on radio and television—in fact, have just returned from a land, Germany, which was made notorious by a silent majority not so very long ago.

But in the end, it is the threat of universal extinction over all the world today that changes totally and forever the nature of reality and brings into devastating question the true meaning of man’s history. We human beings now have the power to exterminate ourselves. This seems to be the entire sum of our achievements. We have taken this journey and arrived at this place in God’s name. This then, is the best that God - the white God - can do. If that is so, then it is time to replace him.

The conquests of England - every single one of them bloody - are part of what Americans have in mind when they speak of England’s glory. In the United States, violence and heroism have been made synonymous when it comes to Blacks. And the only way to defeat Malcom’s point is to concede and then ask oneself why this is so.

Terrifying, that the loss of intimacy with one person results in the freezing over of the world, and the loss of oneself! And terrifying that the terms of love are so rigorous, its checks and liberties so tightly bound together.

It doesn't do any good to blame people or the time-- one is oneself all those people. We are the time.

I'm beginning to think,' she said, 'that growing means learning more and more about anguish. That poison becomes your diet-- you drink a little of it everyday. Once you've seen it, you can't stop seeing it-- that's the trouble. And it can, it can' -- she passed her hand wearily over her brown again-- 'drive you mad.