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James A. Baldwin Quotes - Page 10

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You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.

You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.

James A. Baldwin
Home, Left

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

James A. Baldwin
Time, Memories, Future

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

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

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

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

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

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

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)

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

James A. Baldwin
Love, Ambition, Literature

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'.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always be seen as untimely. This is because a real writer is always shifting and changing and searching. The world has many labels for him, of which the most treacherous is the label of Success.

James A. Baldwin
Real, Writing, Labels

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

James A. Baldwin
Why Not

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