787 Quotes by James Baldwin

She was twenty and had come to realize that, though she had a voice, she wasn’t a singer; that to endure and embrace the life of a singer demands a whole lot more than a voice.

We are very cruelly trapped between what we would like to be and what we actually are. And we cannot possibly become what we would like to be until we are willing to ask ourselves just why the lives we lead on this continent are mainly so empty, so tame, and so ugly.

The question of sexual dominance can exist only in the nightmare of that soul which has armed itself, totally, against the possibility of the changing motion of conquest and surrender, which is love.

I can’t be a pessimist because I’m alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter.

Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise.

People find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.

You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important.

It goes without saying, I believe, that if we understood ourselves better, we would damage ourselves less.

If one cannot risk oneself, then one is simply incapable of giving. And, after all, one can give freedom only be setting someone free.