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Life Quotes by James Baldwin

41 Life quotes by James Baldwin

All Life quotes James Baldwin’s page

James Baldwin describes life as a deep sea where time drifts above, making hours feel meaningless. He urges us to say yes to life even in harsh places, following the rhythm of our own blood. He also points out that artists turn the chaos of life into order.

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“I know that people can be better than they are. We are capable of bearing a great burden, once we discover that…

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“I am not trying to be méchant when I talk about women. I respect women—very much—for their inside life, which is not…

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“This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.”

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“A real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things that can be named.”

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“One must say Yes to life and embrace it wherever it is found—and it is found in terrible places; nevertheless, there it…

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Not everything that we face can be changed but nothing can be changed until it's faced.

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“I remembered that life in that room seemed to be occuring beneath the sea, time flowed past indiffrently above us, hours and…

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“If the hope of giving is to love the living, the giver risks madness in the act of giving.”

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“It seems to be typical of life in America, where opportunities, real and fancied, are thicker than anywhere else on the globe,…

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“This laughter is the laughter of those who consider themselves to be at a safe remove from all the wretched, for whom…

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“When he was dead I realized that I had hardly ever spoken to him. When he had been dead a long time…

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“I can conceive of no Negro native to this country who has not, by the age of puberty, been irreparably scarred by…

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“To accept one's past - one's history - is not the same things as drowning in it. An invented past can never…

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

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

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“The people in Harlem know they are living there because white people do not think they are good enough to live anywhere…

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“I suppose this is why I asked her to marry me: to give me something to be moored to. Perhaps this was…

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“In the Negro world, as in the white world, Negroes who have money band together and try to ignore the existence of…

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“I remember that life in that room seemed to be occurring beneath the sea, time flowed past indifferently above us, hours and…

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“I saw myself, sharply, as a wanderer, an adventurer, rocking through the world, unanchored. [...] The wind of my life was blowing…

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“I was in a terrible confusion. Sometimes I thought, but this is your life. Stop fighting it. Stop fighting. Or I thought,…

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“Americans are as unlike any other white people in the world as it is possible to be. I do not think, for…

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“when the black populations of the world have a future, so will the Western nations have a future-and not till then. But…

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“And this was perhaps the first time in my life that death occurred to me as a reality. I thought of the…

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“If one wishes to be instructed--not that anyone does--concerning the treacherous role that memory plays in a human life, consider how relentlessly…

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“The American idea of sexuality appears to be rooted in the American idea of masculinity. Idea may not be the precise word,…

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“When I watched all the children, their copper, brown, and beige faces staring up at me as I taught Sunday school, I…

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“For I am—or I was—one of those people who pride themselves in on their willpower, on their ability to make a decision…

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“The trouble with a secret life is that it is very frequently a secret from the person who lives it and not…

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

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

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“Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us,…

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“This was the last time I ever saw my mother alive. Just the same, this picture gets all mixed up in my…

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“The real troubles with living is that living is so banal. Everyone, after all, goes the same dark road—and the road has…

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“When I watched all the children, their copper, brown, and beige faces staring up at me as I taught Sunday school, I…

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“If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own-which it is-and render impassable with our…

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“You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don't live the only life you have, you won't live some…

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“Life, it is true, is a process of decisions and alternatives, the conscious awareness and acceptance of limitations. Experience, nevertheless, to say…

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“The woman on the bed was old, her life was fading as the mist rose. She thought of her mother as already…

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“Best advice I ever got was an old friend of mine, a black friend, who said you have to go the way…

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More by James Baldwin

“In any case, white people, who had robbed black people of their liberty and who profited by this theft every hour that they lived,…

“The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live, and have lived here, are so ugly…

“All cultures have, furthermore, an economic, social, and political base, and no culture can continue to live if its political destiny is not in…

“I remembered that life in that room seemed to be occuring beneath the sea, time flowed past indiffrently above us, hours and days had…

“No. It would help if I were able to feel guilty.But the end of innocence is also the end of guilt”

“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…

“What kind of friendship have you had? Or for that matter...what kind of love affairs?”

“For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for what they become.”

“Every society is really governed by hidden laws, by unspoken but profound assumptions on the part of the people, and ours is no exception.”

“In those days my mother was given to the exasperating and mysterious habit of having babies.”

“He was suggesting that all Negroes were held in a state of supreme tension between the difficult, dangerous relationship in which they stood to…

“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…

“If the world wasn't so full of dead folks maybe those of us that's trying to live wouldn't have to suffer so bad.”

“I am very much concerned that American Negroes achieve their freedom here in the United States. But I am also concerned for their dignity,…

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