787 Quotes by James Baldwin

To accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it.

We take our shape, it is true, within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth; and yet it is precisely through our dependence on this reality that we are most endlessly betrayed.

People can cry much easier than they can change, a rule of psychology people like me picked up as kids on the street.

I am certainly convinced that it is one of the greatest impulses of mankind to arrive at something higher than a natural state.

His body, which I had come to know so well, glowed in the light and charged and thickened the air between us. Then something opened in my brain, a secret, noiseless door swung open, frightening me: it had not occurred to me until that instant that, in fleeing from his body, I confirmed and perpetuated his body’s power over me.

The body in the mirror forces me to turn and face it. And I look at my body, which is under sentence of death. It is lean, hard, and cold, the incarnation of a mystery. And I do not know what moves in this body, what this body is searching. It is trapped in my mirror as it is trapped in time and it hurries toward revelation.

The writer’s greed is appalling. He wants, or seems to want, everything and practically everybody, in another sense, and at the same time, he needs no one at all.

If you really want to know something about solitude, become famous.

A man’s balance depends on the weight he carries between his legs.