james baldwin Quotes

If you know from whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations on where you can go.

- James Baldwin

You can not describe anything without betraying your point of view, your aspirations, your fears, your hopes. Everything.

- James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.

- James Baldwin

We take our shape it is true within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth and yet it is precisely through our dependence on this reality that we are most endlessly betrayed.

- James Baldwin

Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.

- 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

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

When he was dead I realized that I had hardly ever spoken to him. When he had been dead a long time I began to wish I had. It seems to be typical of life in America, where opportunities, real and fancied, are thicker than anywhere else on the globe, that the second generation has no time to talk to the first.

- James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live here, and have lived here, are so ugly.

- James Baldwin

I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.

- James Baldwin

You focus on telling stories,
we do everything else.