Top James Baldwin Quotes

But I felt that it was my heart which was broken. Something had broken in me to make me so cold and so perfectly still and far away.

The Americans have no sense of doom, none whatever. They do not recognize doom when they see it.

I do not know what I would do if you left me. For the first time I felt the suggestion of a threat in his voice—or I put it there. I have been alone so long—I do not think I would be able to live if I...

But she saw nothing in my eyes—she stared at me as though I had made a long journey on a white charger all the way to her prison house.

The morning weighs on my shoulders with the dreadful weight of hope and I take the blue envelope which Jacques has sent me and tear it slowly into many pieces, watching them dance in the wind, watchin...

I had to get out of there for my face showed too much, the war in my body was dragging me down. My feet refused to carry me over to him again. The wind of my life was blowing me away.

No matter how it seems now, I must confess: I loved him. I do not think that I will ever love anyone like that again. And this might be a great relief if I did not also know that, when the knife has f...

Whose little boy are you?

He smiled, Why, you will go home and then you will find that home is not home anymore. Then you will really be in trouble. As long as you stay here, you can always think: One day I will go home. He pl...

I loved her as much as ever and I still did not know how much that was.

One of these days, he said. Everything bad will happen—one of these days.

Maybe everything bad that happens to you makes you weaker, said Giovanni, as though he had not heard me, and so you can stand less and less.

All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.

He was waiting, I think, for me to cross that space and take him in my arms again—waiting, as one waits at a deathbed for the miracle one dare not disbelieve, which will not happen.

On each piece of paper I found addresses, telephone numbers, memos of various rendezvous made and kept—or perhaps not kept—people met and remembered, or perhaps not remembered, hopes probably not fulf...

To begin with, the room was not large enough for two. It looked out on a small courtyard. 'Looked out' means only that the room had two windows, against which the courtyard malevolently pressed, encro...

I stared at absurd Paris, which was as cluttered now, under the scalding sun, as the landscape of my heart.

The fact that their [the flower children's] uniforms and their jargons precisely represented the distances they had yet to cover before arriving at that maturity which makes love possible—or no longer...

Whereas Jesus and his disciples were distrusted by the state largely because they respected the poor and shared everything, the fundamentalists of the present hour would appear not to know that the po...

People, I have learned, have a way of taking root in one's still-developing mind without our knowing it, especially people, like [James] Baldwin, who live in the world of words.