James Baldwin quotes - page 8

Literature is indispensable to the world. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way a person looks at reality, then you can change it. (James Baldwin)
Perhaps I did not succumb to ideology ... because I have never seen myself as a spokesman. I am a witness. View quote
James Baldwin
The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately. View quote
James Baldwin
One must say Yes to life, and embrace it wherever it is found - and it is found in terrible places. View quote
James Baldwin
If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. View quote
James Baldwin
It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I'd been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here. View quote
James Baldwin
Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know. View quote
James Baldwin
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. View quote
James Baldwin
If you cannot love me, I will die. Before you came I wanted to die, I have told you many times. It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody. View quote
James Baldwin
It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror. View quote
James Baldwin
The subtle and deadly change of heart that might occur in you would be involved with the realization that a civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless. (James Baldwin)
With everything in me screaming No! yet the sum of me sighed Yes. View quote
James Baldwin
Whose little boy are you? View quote
James Baldwin
Nobody can stay in the garden of Eden,' Jacques said. And then: 'I wonder why. View quote
James Baldwin
Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a sense of life's possibilities. View quote
James Baldwin
An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience. View quote
James Baldwin
It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian. View quote
James Baldwin
The reason people think it's important to be white is that they think it's important not to be black. View quote
James Baldwin
The making of an American begins at the point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land. View quote
James Baldwin
We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours. View quote
James Baldwin
The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status quo; are responsible for their slaughter and enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children whenever and wherever they decide that their "vital interests" are menaced, and think nothing of torturing a man to death: these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the "sanctity" of human life, or the "conscience" of the civilized world. (James Baldwin)
If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him. View quote
James Baldwin
It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless. View quote
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 effort it seems to me, is: if you can examine and face your life, you can discover the terms with which you are connected to other lives, and they can discover them, too - the terms with which they are connected to other people. View quote
James Baldwin
Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment, unable to see and not daring to imagine what the future will now bring forth, one clings to what one knew, or dreamed that one possessed. Yet, it is only when a man is able, without bitterness or self-pity, to surrender a dream he has long cherished or a privilege he has long possessed that he is set free - he has set himself free - for higher dreams, for greater privileges. View quote
James Baldwin