787 Quotes by James Baldwin

Well,’ I said, ‘Paris is old, is many centuries. You feel, in Paris, all the time gone by. That isn’t what you feel in New York — ’He was smiling. I stopped.‘What do you feel in New York?’ he asked.‘Perhaps you feel,’ I told him, ‘all the time to come. There’s such power there, everything is in such movement. You can’t help wondering—I can’t help wondering—what it will all be like—many years from now.

People are continually pointing out to me the wretchedness of white people in order to console me for the wretchedness of blacks. But an itemized account of the American failure does not console me and it should not console anyone else. That hundreds of thousands of white people are living, in effect, no better than the "niggers" is not a fact to be regarded with complacency. The social and moral bankruptcy suggested by this fact is of the bitterest, most terrifying kind.

Allegiance, after all, has to work two ways; and one can grow weary of an allegiance which is not reciprocal.

The question of color was but another detail, somewhere between being six feet tall and being six feet under.

Lord, that Hollywood train, forever coming round the bend!

Not everything that is face can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

Man," Fonny says, "we just have to move it from day to day. If you think too much about it, you really are fucked, can't move at all.

No matter how it seems now, I must confess: I loved him. I do not think that I will ever love anyone like that again.

No matter how it seems now, I must confess: I loved him. I do not think I will ever love anyone like that again.