James A. Baldwin Quotes - Page 10

Quotes about:

• Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.

  James A. Baldwin

  White, People, Knows

  "The Fire Next Time". Book by James A. Baldwin, 1963.

  4 Copy quote

• Experience is a private, very largely speechless affair.

  James A. Baldwin

  Experience, Affair, Speechless

  5 Copy quote

• What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one's heroic ancestors.

  James A. Baldwin

  America, Identity, Heroic

  "For the Love of God — and Country" by Bryan Berghoef, www.huffingtonpost.com. June 27, 2013.

  5 Copy quote

• The future is like heaven-everyone exalts it but no one wants to go there now.

  James A. Baldwin

  Time, Memories, Future

  11 Copy quote

• There exists among the intolerable degraded, the perverse and powerful desire to force into the arena of the actual those fantastic crimes of which they have been accused, achieving their vengeance and their own destruction through making the nightmare real.

  James A. Baldwin

  Powerful, Real, Evil

  7 Copy quote

• If you are going to be a writer there is nothing I can say to stop you; if you're not going to be a writer nothing I can say will help you. What you really need at the beginning is somebody to let you know that the effort is real.

  James A. Baldwin

  Real, Writing, Effort

  11 Copy quote

• We cannot discuss the state of our minorities until we first have some sense of what we are, who we are, what our goals are, and what we take life to be. The question is not what we can do now for the hypothetical Mexican, the hypothetical Negro. The question is what we really want out of life, for ourselves, what we think is real.

  James A. Baldwin

  Life, Real, Thinking

  12 Copy quote

• 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.

  James A. Baldwin

  Ivory, Piano, Trying

  7 Copy quote

• Everybody's journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.

  James A. Baldwin

  Falling In Love, Gay, Boys

  20 Copy quote

• When human rights are abused on a grand scale, the broth of purity boils and feeds the rebellion of a new order.

  James A. Baldwin

  Rights, Order, Revolution

  5 Copy quote

• 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.

  James A. Baldwin

  Funny, Money, Sex

  "The Black Boy Looks at theWhite Boy" (1961)

  10 Copy quote

• The writer's greed is appalling. He wants, or seems to want, everything and practically everybody, in another sense, and at the same time, he needs no one at all.

  James A. Baldwin

  Writing, Greed, Needs

  1961 Nobody Knows My Name,'Alas, Poor Richard'.

  8 Copy quote

• All art is a kind of confession.

  James A. Baldwin

  Art, Kind, Confession

  "Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son". Book by James A. Baldwin, 1961.

  12 Copy quote

• The noblest spirit is most strongly attracted by the love of glory.

  James A. Baldwin

  Love, Ambition, Literature

  8 Copy quote

• We are very cruelly trapped between what we would like to be and what we actually are. And we cannot possibly become what we would like to be until we are willing to ask ourselves just why the lives we lead on this continent are mainly so empty, so tame, and so ugly.

  James A. Baldwin

  Ugly, Empty, Willing

  8 Copy quote

• I remember standing on a street corner with the black painter Beauford Delaney down in the Village, waiting for the light to change, and he pointed down and said, 'Look.' I looked and all I saw was water. And he said, 'Look again,' which I did, and I saw oil on the water and the city reflected in the puddle. It was a great revelation to me. I can't explain it. He taught me how to see, and how to trust what I saw. Painters have often taught writers how to see. And once you've had that experience, you see differently.

  James A. Baldwin

  Writing, Light, Cities

  21 Copy quote

• When you're writing you're trying to find out something which you don't know.

  James A. Baldwin

  Writing, Trying, Knows

  "LGBTQ People Of Color Are Not Monolithic—In Reality Or Fiction" by Riley S. Wilson, www.huffingtonpost.com. July 13, 2015.

  8 Copy quote

• Our dehumanization of the Negro then is indivisible from our dehumanization of ourselves; the loss of our own identity is the price we pay for our annulment of his.

  James A. Baldwin

  Loss, Justice, Diversity

  49 Copy quote

• The states of birth, suffering, love, and death, are extreme states: extreme, universal, and inescapable. We all know this, but we would rather not know it. The artist is present to correct the delusions to which we are all prey in our attempts to avoid this knowledge." - James Baldwin, "The Creative Process

  James A. Baldwin

  Artist, Creative, Suffering

  5 Copy quote

• It must be remembered that in those great days I was considered to be an "integrationist" - this was never, quite, my own idea of myself - and Malcolm was considered to be a "racist in reverse." This formulation, in terms of power - and power is the arena in which racism is acted out - means absolutely nothing: it may even be described as a cowardly formulation. The powerless, by definition, can never be "racists," for they can never make the world pay for what they feel or fear except by the suicidal endeavor which makes them fanatics or revolutionaries, or both.

  James A. Baldwin

  Suicidal, Mean, Ideas

  5 Copy quote

• Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others. Pessimists are also people who think the human race is beneath their notice, that they're better than other human beings.

  James A. Baldwin

  Thinking, Race, People

  9 Copy quote

• Youth must be the worst time in anybody's life. Everything's happening for the first time, which means that sorrow, then, lasts forever. Later, you can see that there was something very beautiful in it. That's because you ain't got to go through it no more.

  James A. Baldwin

  Beautiful, Mean, Forever

  5 Copy quote

• The wretched of the earth do not decide to become extinct, they resolve, on the contrary, to multiply: life is their weapon against life, life is all that they have.

  James A. Baldwin

  Earth, Weapons, Life Is

  5 Copy quote

• The world's definitions are one thing and the life one actually lives is quite another. One cannot allow oneself, nor one's family, friends, or lovers - to say nothing of one's children - to live according to the world's definitions: one must find a way, perpetually, to be stronger and better than that.

  James A. Baldwin

  Children, Stronger, World

  8 Copy quote

• You took the best, so why not take the rest?

  James A. Baldwin

  Why Not

  7 Copy quote

Page 10 of 16

First

← Prev

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

Next →

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin