“I suppose this is why I asked her to marry me: to give me something to be moored to. Perhaps this was… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“When I watched all the children, their copper, brown, and beige faces staring up at me as I taught Sunday school, I… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“It seems to be typical of life in America, where opportunities, real and fancied, are thicker than anywhere else on the globe,… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“The people in Harlem know they are living there because white people do not think they are good enough to live anywhere… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“In the Negro world, as in the white world, Negroes who have money band together and try to ignore the existence of… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“The trouble with a secret life is that it is very frequently a secret from the person who lives it and not… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“I saw myself, sharply, as a wanderer, an adventurer, rocking through the world, unanchored. [...] The wind of my life was blowing… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“The woman on the bed was old, her life was fading as the mist rose. She thought of her mother as already… — 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
“The American idea of sexuality appears to be rooted in the American idea of masculinity. Idea may not be the precise word,… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“I can conceive of no Negro native to this country who has not, by the age of puberty, been irreparably scarred by… — 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
“To accept one's past - one's history - is not the same things as drowning in it. An invented past can never… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“I know that people can be better than they are. We are capable of bearing a great burden, once we discover that… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“Life, it is true, is a process of decisions and alternatives, the conscious awareness and acceptance of limitations. Experience, nevertheless, to say… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“For I am—or I was—one of those people who pride themselves in on their willpower, on their ability to make a decision… — 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
