787 Quotes by James Baldwin

Love forces, at last, this humility: you cannot love if you cannot be loved, you cannot see if you cannot be seen.

And I was yet aware that this was only a moment, that the world waited outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched above us, longer than the sky.

Sometimes, when he was not near me, I thought, I will never let him ‘Touch’ me again. Then, when he ‘Touched’ me, I thought, it doesn’t matter, it is only the body, it will soon be over. When it was over, I lay in the dark and listened to his breathing and dreamed of the ‘Touch’ of hands, of Giovanni’s hands, or anybody’s hands, hands which would have the power to crush me and make me whole again.

These captive men are the hidden price for a hiden lie: the righteous must be able to locate the damned.

For nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.

Any society inevitably produces its criminals, but a society at once rigid and unstable can do nothing whatever to alleviate the poverty of its lowest members, cannot present to the hypothetical young man at the crucial moment that so-well-advertised right path.

There are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people.

The black man in our midst carried murder in his heart, he wanted vengeance. We carried murder too, we wanted peace.

Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always seem untimely.