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"It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story."
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"Music reveals the deepest beauty of the soul."
"If I had the choice, I would sing only love songs."
"Music made me kinder. Music made me a lover."
Explore more quotes by James Baldwin
"It does seem - well, difficult - to be at the mercy of some gross, unshaven stranger before you can begin to be yourself."
"Sometimes, when he was not near me, I thought, I will never let him 'Touch' me again. Then, when he 'Touched' me, I thought, it doesn't matter, it is only the body, it will soon be over. When it was over, I lay in the dark and listened to his breathing and dreamed of the 'Touch' of hands, of Giovanni's hands, or anybody's hands, hands which would have the power to crush me and make me whole again."
"I can't be a pessimist because I'm alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter."
"I told myself all sorts of lies, standing there at the bar, but I could not move. And this was partly because I knew that it did not really matter anymore; it did not even matter if I never spoke to Giovanni again; for they had become visible, as visible as the wafers on the shirt of the flaming princess, they stormed all over me, my awakening, my insistent possibilities."
"Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore."
"No one knows very much about the life of another. This ignorance becomes vivid, if you love another. Love sets the imagination on fire, and, also, eventually, chars the imagination into a harder element: imagination cannot match love, cannot plunge so deep, or range so wide."
"She fitted in my arms, she always had, and the shock of holding her caused me to feel that my arms had been empty since she had been away."
"There are women who have forgotten that to be a woman doesn't simply mean humiliation, doesn't simply mean bitterness. I haven't forgotten it yet...I'm not going to forget it."
"Giovanni had awakened an itch, had released a gnaw in me. I realized it one afternoon, when I was taking him to work via the Boulevard Montparnasse. We had bought a kilo of cherries and we were eating them as we walked along. We were both insufferably childish and high-spirited that afternoon and the spectacle we presented, two grown men jostling each other on the wide sidewalk and aiming the cherry pits, as though they were spitballs, into each other's faces, must have been outrageous. And I realized that such childishness was fantastic at my age and the happiness out of which it sprang yet more so; for that moment I really loved Giovanni, who had never seemed more beautiful than he was that afternoon."
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