“Perhaps the best way to sum all this up is to say that the people I knew felt, mainly, a peculiar kind… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“And the others, who have avoided all of these deaths, get up in the morning and go downtown to meet “the man.”… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“If you cannot love me, I will die. Before you came I wanted to die, I have told you many times. It… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“If one wishes to be instructed--not that anyone does--concerning the treacherous role that memory plays in a human life, consider how relentlessly… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“It takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“When he was dead I realized that I had hardly ever spoken to him. When he had been dead a long time… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“every clanging ambulance bell, in every scar on the faces of the pimps and their whores, in every helpless, newborn baby being… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“all that befell: in her joys, her pipe in the evening, her man at night, the children she suckled, and guided on… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“He and his boys up there were keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness, and death, in order to… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“And this was perhaps the first time in my life that death occurred to me as a reality. I thought of the… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“But white Americans do not believe in death, and this is why the darkness of my skin so intimidates them.” — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us,… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“Beneath the face of anyone you ever loved for true - anyone you love, you will always love, love is not at… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“In any case, white people, who had robbed black people of their liberty and who profited by this theft every hour that they lived,… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live, and have lived here, are so ugly… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“All cultures have, furthermore, an economic, social, and political base, and no culture can continue to live if its political destiny is not in… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“I remembered that life in that room seemed to be occuring beneath the sea, time flowed past indiffrently above us, hours and days had… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“No. It would help if I were able to feel guilty.But the end of innocence is also the end of guilt” — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“Perhaps now, though, he had hit bottom. One thing about the bottom, he told himself, you can't fall any further. He tried to take… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“What kind of friendship have you had? Or for that matter...what kind of love affairs?” — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for what they become.” — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“Every society is really governed by hidden laws, by unspoken but profound assumptions on the part of the people, and ours is no exception.” — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“In those days my mother was given to the exasperating and mysterious habit of having babies.” — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“He was suggesting that all Negroes were held in a state of supreme tension between the difficult, dangerous relationship in which they stood to… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“In the beginning—and neither can this be overstated—a Negro just cannot believe that white people are treating him as they do; he does not… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
