James A. Baldwin

Experience is a private, very largely speechless affair.

Rage cannot be hidden, it can only be dissembled. This dissembling deludes the thoughtless, and strengthens rage and adds, to rage, contempt.

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.

People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.

There are people in the world for whom "coming along" is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.

Voyagers discover that the world can never be larger than the person that is in the world; but it is impossible to foresee this, it is impossible to be warned.

The question of sexual dominance can exist only in the nightmare of that soul which has armed itself, totally, against the possibility of the changing motion of conquest and surrender, which is love.

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.

Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.

Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.

People can cry much easier than they can change.

Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.

Fires can't be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in our daily work lightens effort and turns even labor into pleasant tasks.

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.

I don't know, now, when I first looked at Hella and found her stale, found her body uninteresting, her presence grating. It seemed to happen all at once—I suppose that only means that it had been happening for a long time.

People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen forget.

The place in which I'll fit will not exist until I make it.

The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.

No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.