“You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“Why am I going home? he asked himself. But he knew why. It was time. In order not to lose all that… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“while the excluded begin to realize, having endured everything, that they can endure everything. They do not know the precise shape of… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“Not only was I not born to be a slave: I was not born to hope to become the equal of the… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“The baby was restless, and I was scared. It was almost time. I was so tired, I almost wanted to die. For… — 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
“All for the first time, in the days when acts had no consequences and nothing was irrecoverable, and love was simple and… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“Until i die there will be these moments, moments seeming to rise up out of the ground like Macbeth's witches, when his… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“if you’ve loved anybody that long, first as an infant, then as a child, then as a man, you gain a strange… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“And his mind could not contain the terrible stretch of time that united twelve men fishing by the shores of Galilee, and… — 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
“He stood for a moment on the melting snow, distracted, and then began to run down the hill, feeling himself fly as… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“Now, one hears from a long time ago that "white is merely a state of mind." I add to that, white is… — 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
