James Baldwin

It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
-James Baldwin

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

Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?
-James Baldwin

Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
-James Baldwin

Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.
-James Baldwin

All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason. And his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours.
-James Baldwin, Sonny's Blues

When you're writing you're trying to find out something which you don't know.
-James Baldwin

The writer's only real task: to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.
-James Baldwin

Hatred is always self hatred, and there is something suicidal about it.
-James Baldwin