787 Quotes by James Baldwin

The root of the black man’s hatred is rage, and he does not so much hate white men as simply wants them out of his way, and, more than that, out of his children’s way.

It is astonishing that in a country so devoted to the individual, so many people should be afraid to speak.

What a great difference there is,′ she said, ’between dreaming of something and dealing with it!

This is the charged, the dangerous moment, when everything must be re-examined, must be made new, when nothing at all can be taken for granted.

All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it.

But I know about suffering; if that helps. I know that it ends. I ain’t going to tell you no lies, like it always ends for the better. Sometimes it ends for the worse. You can suffer so bad that you can be driven to a place where you can’t ever suffer again: and that’s worse.

Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.

Other people cannot see what I see whenever I look into your father’s face, for behind your father’s face as it is today are all those other faces which were his.

And then, again, I was undergoing with my father what the very young inevitability undergo with their elders: I was beginning to judge him. And the very harshness of this judgement, which broke my heart, revealed, though I could not have said it then, how much I had loved him, how that love, along with my innocence, was dying.