James Baldwin

“Nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.”

— James Baldwin

Your crown has been bought and paid for. All you must do is put it on.

— James Baldwin

“It ain't only the bad ones, nor yet the dumb ones that gets sucked under.”

— James Baldwin

“One must be careful not to take refuge in any delusion.”

— James Baldwin

“Don’t think I don’t know you love me. You believe we going to make it?”

— James Baldwin

“sin is the only heritage of the natural man”

— James Baldwin

“I hope that nobody has ever had to look at anybody they love through glass.”

— James Baldwin

“Love was a country he knew nothing about.”

— James Baldwin

“The salvation of America lies in whether or not it is able to embrace the black face. If it cannot do that,…

— James Baldwin

“The sons of the masters were roaming the world, looking for arms to hold them. And the arms that might have held…

— James Baldwin

“It is a terrible omen when you see an American flag on somebody else’s car and realize that’s your enemy.”

— James Baldwin

“I had written to friends for money, of course, but the Atlantic Ocean is deep and wide and money doesn't hurry from…

— James Baldwin

“His touch could never fail to make me feel desire; yet his hot, sweet breath also made me want to vomit.”

— James Baldwin

“All that hatred down there," he said, "all that hatred and misery and love. It's a wonder it doesn't blow the avenue…

— James Baldwin

“but the Atlantic Ocean is deep and wide and money doesn't hurry from the other side.”

— James Baldwin

“In Harlem, Negro policemen are feared more than whites, for they have more to prove and fewer ways to prove it”

— James Baldwin

“No man can say whether you are happy or not until you die, for no man knows misfortunes may overtake you or…

— James Baldwin

“Yet it is only when one is able, without bitterness or self-pity, to surrender a dream one has long cherished, or a…

— James Baldwin

“You think...that my life is shameful because my encounters are. And they are. But you should ask yourself why they are. Why…

— James Baldwin

“Then I wanted to beg him to forgive me. But this would have been too great a confession; any yielding at that…

— James Baldwin

Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a…

— James Baldwin

“Now, one hears from a long time ago that "white is merely a state of mind." I add to that, white is…

— James Baldwin

“There is something fantastic in the spectacle I now present to myself of having run so far, so hard, across the ocean…

— James Baldwin

“The subtle and deadly change of heart that might occur in you would be involved with the realization that a civilization is…

— James Baldwin

“The paradox—and a fearful paradox it is—is that the American Negro can have no future anywhere, on any continent, as long as…

— James Baldwin

“In the beginning—and neither can this be overstated—a Negro just cannot believe that white people are treating him as they do; he…

— James Baldwin

“This lack of what may roughly be called social paranoia causes the American writer in Europe to feel—almost certainly for the first…

— James Baldwin

“while the excluded begin to realize, having endured everything, that they can endure everything. They do not know the precise shape of…

— James Baldwin

“I know what I'm asking is impossible. But in our time, as in every time, the impossible is the least that one…

— James Baldwin

“I was also able to see that the principles governing the rites and customs of the churches in which I grew up…

— James Baldwin

“Why are we weighed upon with heaviness, And utterly consumed with sharp distress, While all things else have rest from weariness? All…

— James Baldwin

“You smiled at me the way you smiled at everyone, you told me what you told everyone—and you tell nothing but lies.…

— James Baldwin

“Beneath the face of anyone you ever loved for true - anyone you love, you will always love, love is not at…

— James Baldwin

“It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition.…

— James Baldwin

“The treatment accorded the Negro during the Second World War marks, for me, a turning point in the Negro’s relation to America.…

— James Baldwin

“All cultures have, furthermore, an economic, social, and political base, and no culture can continue to live if its political destiny is…

— James Baldwin

“Art has to be a kind of confession. I don’t mean a true confession in the sense of that dreary magazine. The…

— James Baldwin

“A mob cannot afford to doubt: that the Jews killed Christ or that niggers want to rape their sisters or that anyone…

— James Baldwin

“I did not tell him my decision, that would have broken my will. I did not wait to have breakfast with him…

— James Baldwin

“That day in Chartres they had passed through town and watched women kneeling at the edge of the water, pounding clothes against…

— James Baldwin