James Baldwin Quotes: 14

• You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that 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 had ever been alive.

• You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.

• Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.

• Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.

  Giovanni's Room

• Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

• It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.

• Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.

• I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it--it, the physical act.I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.

  Giovanni's Room

• 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.

  Giovanni's Room

• But it was not the room’s disorder which was frightening; it was the fact that when one began searching for the key to this disorder, one realized that it was not to be found in any of the usual places. For this was not a matter of habit or circumstance or temperament; it was a matter of punishment and grief.

  Giovanni's Room

• The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.

• Whose little boy are you?

  The Fire Next Time

• We do not trust educated people and rarely, alas, produce them, for we do not trust the independence of mind which alone makes a genuine education possible.

  Nobody Knows My Name

• It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death-- ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us.

  The Fire Next Time