Here’s the thing about James Baldwin’s prose: As noted earlier, from the start, he was audacious in his love for complex sentences; one might say even fearless in the way he deployed the English language. Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Malcolm Lowry, among English-language writers, dared put so much demand on the language. To watch them create a sentence is often like watching a high-wire act. Death-defying sentences. Lush, romantic sentences. Sentences that dared to swallow the entire world.

— James Baldwin

James Baldwin Quotes

I did not want to know what his status was with Jacques; yet the day came when it was revealed to me in Jacques’ spiteful and triumphant eyes. And Giovanni, during this short encounter, in the middle of the boulevard as dusk fell, with people hurrying all about us, was really amazingly giddy and girlish, and very drunk – it was as though he were forcing me to taste the cup of his humiliation. And I hated him for this.

— James Baldwin

I see his legs buckle, his thighs jelly, the buttocks quiver, the secret hammer there begins to knock.

— James Baldwin

The journey to the grave is already begun, the journey to corruption is, always, already, half over. Yet, the key to my salvation, which cannot save my body, is hidden in my flesh.

— James Baldwin

All the white people she has ever met needed, in one way or another, to be reassured, consoled, to have their consciences pricked but not blasted; could not, could not afford to hear a truth which would shatter, irrevocably, their image of themselves. It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.

— James Baldwin

I began, perhaps, to be lonely that summer and began, that summer, the flight which has brought me to this darkening window. And yet – when one begins to search for the crucial, the definitive moment, the moment which changed all others, one finds oneself pressing, in great pain, through a maze of false signals and abruptly locking doors.

— James Baldwin

It is the peculiar triumph of society – and its loss – that it is able to convince those people to whom it has given inferior status of the reality of this decree.

— James Baldwin

My sullenness delighted him. “You’re charming,” he said. “Do you always speak like this?

— James Baldwin

I conceive of my own life as a journey toward something I do not understand, which in the going toward, makes me better.

— James Baldwin

The root of the white man’s hatred is terror, a bottomless and nameless terror, which focuses on the black, surfacing, and concentrating on this dread figure, an entity which lives only in his mind. But the root of the black man’s hatred is rage, and he does not so much hate white men as simply want them out of his way, and, more than that, out of his children’s way. When.

— James Baldwin

For a moment I longed, with all my heart, to be able to feel whatever they were feeling, if only to know what such a feeling was like.

— James Baldwin

Consider this,” he said. “I am a French director who has never seen your country. I have never done you any harm, except, perhaps, historically – I mean, because I am white – but I cannot be blamed for that – ” “But I can be,” I said, “and I am! I’ve never understood why, if I have to pay for the history written in the color of my skin, you should get off scot-free!

— James Baldwin

And she began rather to envy the stocky girl with the crush on Frank Sinatra, since she would settle one day, obviously, for a great deal less, and probably turn out children as Detroit turned out cars and never sigh for an instant for what she had missed, having indeed never, and especially with a lifetime of moviegoing behind her, missed anything.

— James Baldwin

But they didn’t,” she said, “happen to you because you were white. They just happened. But what happens up here” – and the cab came out of the park; she stretched her hands, inviting him to look – “happens because they are colored. And that makes a difference.

— James Baldwin

One day, when you’re happy, try to forgive me.

— James Baldwin

The power and the promise and the mystery of that body made me suddenly afraid... Precisely, I wanted to know that mystery and feel that power and have that promise fulfilled by me.

— James Baldwin

I was at the door with my suitcase. With my hand on the knob, I looked at him. Then I wanted to beg him to forgive me. But this would have been too great a confession; any yielding at that moment would have locked me forever in that room with him.

— James Baldwin

Before you came I wanted to die, I have told you many times. It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody.

— James Baldwin

I have been alone so long – I do not think I would be able to live if I had to be alone again.

— James Baldwin

On the morning of the evening that we met I had been turned out of my room. I did not owe an awful lot of money, only around six thousand francs, but Parisian hotel-keepers have a way of smelling poverty and then they do what anybody does who is aware of a bad smell; they throw whatever stinks outside.

— James Baldwin

Looking at his face, it sometimes came to her that all women had been cursed from the cradle; all, in one fashion or another, being given the same cruel destiny, born to suffer the weight of men.

— James Baldwin
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