The way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people's pain. - James Baldwin
The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in. - James Baldwin
I don’t know any writers who don’t drink. - James Baldwin
And have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they are white. - James Baldwin
No one knows very much about the life of another. This ignorance becomes vivid, if you love another. Love sets the imagination on fire, and, also, eventually, chars the imagination into a harder element: imagination cannot match love, cannot plunge so deep, or range so wide. - James Baldwin
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, or who had ever been alive. - James Baldwin
There is never a time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment, the time is always now. - 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
Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. - James Baldwin
Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be - James Baldwin
It does seem - well, difficult - to be at the mercy of some gross, unshaven stranger before you can begin to be yourself. - James Baldwin
The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers. - James Baldwin
People can cry much easier than they can change. - James Baldwin
Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go. - James Baldwin
...he wanted me to come home--to come home, as he said, and settle down, and whenever he said that I thought of the sediment at the bottom of a stagnant pond. - James Baldwin
Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society. - James Baldwin
I wish I had heard him more clearly: an oblique confession is always a plea. - James Baldwin
This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art. - James Baldwin
A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled. A child cannot be taught by anyone whose demand, essentially, is that the child repudiate his experience, and all that gives him sustenance. - James Baldwin
You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discovered it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. - James Baldwin
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them. - James Baldwin
Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up. - James Baldwin
Terrifying, that the loss of intimacy with one person results in the freezing over of the world, and the loss of oneself. - James Baldwin
It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind. - James Baldwin
People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead. - James Baldwin