787 Quotes by James Baldwin

The poor are always crossing the Sahara. And the lawyers and bondsmen and all that crowd circle around the poor, exactly like vultures. Of course, they’re not any richer than the poor, really, that’s why they’ve turned into vultures, scavengers, indecent garbage men, and I’m talking about the black cats, too, who, in so many ways, are worse.

For Bigger’s tragedy is not that he is cold or black or hungry, not even that he is American, black; but that he has accepted a theology that denies him life, that he admits the possibility of his being sub-human and feels constrained, therefore, to battle for his humanity according to those brutal criteria bequeathed him at his birth. But our humanity is our burden, our life; we need not battle for it; we need only to do what is infinitely more difficult – that is, accept it.

For here you were, Big James, named for me – you were a big baby, I was not – here you were, to be loved. To be loved, baby, hard, at once, and forever, to strengthen you against the loveless world.

Take no one’s word for anything, including mine – but trust your experience.

I think Americans are terrified of feeling anything. I never met a people more infantile in my life.

There is something terribly radical about believing that one’s own experience and images are important enough to speak about, much less to write about and to perform.

For a woman,” she said, “I think a man is always a stranger. And there’s something awful about being at the mercy of a stranger.

If we understood ourselves better we would damage ourselves less.

I had decided to allow no room in the universe for something which shamed and frightened me.