James Baldwin Quotes

It’s a great city, Paris, a beautiful city––and––it was very good for me.

Well,’ I said, ‘Paris is old, is many centuries. You feel, in Paris, all the time gone by. That isn’t what you feel in New York — ’He was smiling. I stopped.‘What do you feel in New York?’ he asked.‘Perhaps you feel,’ I told him, ‘all the time to come. There’s such power there, everything is in such movement. You can’t help wondering—I can’t help wondering—what it will all be like—many years from now.

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

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.

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.

This world is white no longer and it will never be white again.

Most people in action are not worth very much and yet every human being is an unprecedented miracle.

Experience which destroys innocence also leads one back to it.