James Baldwin – Page 2

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

Be careful what you set your heart upon — for it will surely be yours. – James Baldwin

If youre treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real theyre real for you whether theyre real or not. – James Baldwin

Society is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void, within which, like the earth before the Word was spoken, the foundations of society are hidden. – James Baldwin

When the book comes out it may hurt you — but in order for me to do it, it had to hurt me first. I can only tell you about yourself as much as I can face about myself. – James Baldwin

James Joyce is right about history being a nightmare– but it may be that nightmare from which no one can awaken. People are trapped in history and history in trapped in them. – James Baldwin

Experience is a private, and a very largely speechless affair. – James Baldwin

Experience that destroys innocents also leads one back to it. – James Baldwin

It is very nearly impossible… to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind. – James Baldwin

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

The American ideal, after all, is that everyone should be as much alike as possible. – James Baldwin

Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to ones beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses. – James Baldwin

We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours. – James Baldwin

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

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

All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up. – James Baldwin

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him. – James Baldwin

Everything in life depends on how that life accepts its limits. – James Baldwin

Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the battle field. – James Baldwin

But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power. – James Baldwin