top of page
.png){kind=small}
"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."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Personal quotes
"I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy."
"I was born in Bournemouth, England, in 1943."
"Serious people make a decision to read your fully story before they write you off. Don't worry about those who don't have time to know you."
"See, as much as you want to hold on to the bitter sore memory that someone has left this world, you are still in it. And the very act of living is a tide: at first it seems to make no difference at all, and then one day you look down and see how much pain has eroded."
"Elizabeth's back at the red cross, and I'm walking the dog."
Explore more quotes by James Baldwin
"An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience."
"The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him."
"Most people in action are not worth very much and yet every human being is an unprecedented miracle."
"That summer, in any case, all the fears with which I had grown up, and which were now a part of me and controlled my vision of the world, rose up like a wall between the world and me, and drove me into the church."
"Elisha,' he said, 'no matter what happens to me, where I go, what folks say about me, no matter what anybody says, you remember - please remember - I was saved. I was there."
"No one in the world -- in the entire world -- know more -- knows Americans better or, odd as this may sound, loves them more than the American Negro. This is because he has had to watch you, outwit you, deal with you, and bear you, and sometimes even bleed and die with you, ever since we got here, that is, since both of us, black and white, got here -- and this is a wedding. Whether I like it or not, or whether you like it or not, we are bound together forever. We are part of each other."
"There is an illusion about America, a myth about America to which we are clinging which has nothing to do with the lives we lead and I don't believe that anybody in this country who has really thought about it or really almost anybody who has been brought up against it--and almost all of us have one way or another--this collision between one's image of oneself and what one actually is is always very painful and there are two things you can do about it, you can meet the collision head-on and try and become what you really are or you can retreat and try to remain what you thought you were, which is a fantasy, in which you will certainly perish."
"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 possessed that he is set free - he has set himself free - for higher dreams, for greater privileges."
"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."
bottom of page