787 Quotes by James Baldwin

American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.

Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.

They knew his taxi better than they knew him, if you see what I mean. People always know the outside better than they know the inside.

If you are going to be a writer there is nothing I can say to stop you; if you’re not going to be a writer nothing I can say will help you. What you really need at the beginning is somebody to let you know that the effort is real.

It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.

You might feel different out there, with all the sunshine and oranges and all.

People don’t have any mercy. They tear you limb from limb, in the name of love. Then, when you’re dead, when they’ve killed you by what they made you go through, they say you didn’t have any character. They weep big, bitter tears – not for you. For themselves, because they’ve lost their toy.

Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

To accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.