787 Quotes by James Baldwin

Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.

One day, to everyone’s astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up.

Experience, which destroys innocence, also leads one back to it.

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.

The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.

Everything was as it had been between us, and at the same time everything was different.

The way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.

To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity.

If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, fire next time.