James Baldwin Quotes Page 3

“The reason people think it's important to be white is that they think it's important not to be black.”

“The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.”

“The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat.”

“The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.”

“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.”

“There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.”

“There is a 'sanctity' involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.”

“There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.”

“Those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.”

“To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.”

“To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the making of bread.”

“Voyagers discover that the world can never be larger than the person that is in the world; but it is impossible to foresee this, it is impossible to be warned.”

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

“When a man asks himself what is meant by action he proves that he isn't a man of action. Action is a lack of balance. In order to act you must be somewhat insane. A reasonably sensible man is satisfied with thinking.”

“When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.”

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

“You know, it's not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.”

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”