James Baldwin Quotes

It is a great shock at the age of 5 or 6 to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian.

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.

Experience which destroys innocence also leads one back to it.

Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.

They knew that no one heard, that bloodless people cannot be made to bleed. So they blew what everyone had heard before, they reassured everyone that nothing terrible was happening.

We held each other so close that we might indeed have been one body.

I told myself all sorts of lies, standing there at the bar, but I could not move. And this was partly because I knew that it did not really matter anymore; it did not even matter if I never spoke to Giovanni again; for they had become visible, as visible as the wafers on the shirt of the flaming princess, they stormed all over me, my awakening, my insistent possibilities.

I guess it can’t be too often that two people can laugh and make love, too, make love because they are laughing, laugh because they’re making love. The love and the laughter come from the same place: but not many people go there