Explore Quotes by James A. Baldwin

Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.

To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.

No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.

I want to be an honest man and a good writer.

The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.

Most of us are about as eager to change as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.

People can cry much easier than they can change.

Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.

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

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.

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.

When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.

Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did.

American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.

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

I often wonder what I'd do if there weren't any books in the world.

I had never before thought of how awful the relationship must be between the musician and his instrument. He has to fill it, this instrument, with the breath of life, his own. He has to make it do what he wants it to do. And a piano is just a piano. It's made out of so much wood and wires and little hammers and big ones, and ivory. While there's only so much you can do with it, the only way to find this out is to try; to try and make it do everything.

For nothing is fixed, forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.

Freaks are called freaks and are treated as they are treated – in the main, abominably – because they are human beings who cause to echo, deep within us, our most profound terrors and desires.