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James Baldwin Quotes

Total quotes: 15
“Men spoke of how the heart broke up, but never spoke of how the soul hung speechless in the pause, the void, the terror between the living and the dead.”
— James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain
Tagged: Love, Soul, Life, speak about heartbreaks, Heartbreaks, speak about the soul, Feelings, emotions
“Art is here to prove, and to help one bare, the fact that all safety is an illusion.”
— James Baldwin, The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings
Tagged: Art, Safety
“Sometimes you hear a person speak the truth and you know that they are speaking the truth. But you also know that they have not heard themselves, do not know what they have said: do not know that they have revealed much more than they have said. This may be why the truth remains, on the whole, so rare.”
— James Baldwin, Just Above My Head
Tagged: Wisdom, Truth
“Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.”
— James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name
Tagged: Poverty, classism
“He was defeated long before he died because, at the bottom of his heart, he really believed what white people said about it.”
— James Baldwin, A Letter To My Nephew On The One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation
Tagged: Life
“Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”
— James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name
Tagged: Life
“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.”
— James Baldwin, James Baldwin : Collected Essays : Notes of a Native Son / Nobody Knows My Name / The Fire Next Time / No Name in the Street / The Devil Finds Work / Other Essays (Library of America)
Tagged: Don't Go Back, Self-Love
“Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law.”
— James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son
Tagged: Life
“Nothing is more desirable to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.”
— James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son
Tagged: Life
“‘You are full of nightmares,’ Harriet tells me.”
— James Baldwin, Going to Meet the Man: Stories
Tagged: first lines of books
“Paul did not yet feel her eyes on him.”
— James Baldwin, Come Out the Wilderness
Tagged: first lines of books
“One can only face in others what one can face in oneself. On this confrontation depends the measure of our wisdom and compassion. This energy is all that one finds in the rubble of vanished civilizations, and the only hope for ours.”
— James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name
Tagged: Life
“Thou knowest this man's fall; brother knowst not his wrassling.”
— James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son
Tagged: Life
“The Constitution gives you the right, as a white man, to have a rifle in your home. The Constitution gives you the right to protect yourself. Why is it ‘ominous’ when black people even talk of having rifles? Why don’t we have the right to self-defense? Is it because maybe you know we’re going to have to defend ourselves against you?”
— James Baldwin, One Day When I Was Lost
Tagged: racism, America, Black Lives Matter, black lives, Matter, Police Brutality, Violence, Chance, Progress
“She lay there on a bed that inexorably became a bed of ashes and hot coals, while her imagination dwelt on every conceivable disaster, from his having forsaken her for another woman to his having, somehow, ended up in the morgue. And as the night faded from black to gray to daylight, the telephone began to seem another presence in the house, sitting not far from her like a great, malevolent black cat that might, at any moment, with one shrill cry, scatter her life like dismembered limbs all over this tiny room.”
— James Baldwin, Come Out the Wilderness (Kindle Single) (A Vintage Short)
Tagged: what anxiety feels like, anxiety in literature, Fear, Night, bedtime, nervousness, Feelings, Love, Relationships, Obsession
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