James Baldwin Quotes

life's not a paragraph And death i think is no parenthesis

Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death - ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.

What is our life but a succession of preludes to that unknown song whose first solemn note is sounded by death?

Life is nothing unless death has been faced down.

We can tell the world that there is life after death, but the world really seems to be wondering if there is life before death.

I'm not afraid of death. It's the stake one puts up in order to play the game of life.

I've been running from, and toward, death all my life, more aware of it than a person should be.

There's not a higher stake than someone having to face their own death.

Drink! for you know not whence you came nor why: drink! for you know not why you go, nor where.

When I'm lying in my bed I think about life and I think about death and neither one particularly appeals to me.

Obviously death is a theme I'm fascinated by.

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

One always dies too soon or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life.

People who think dying is the worst thing don't know a thing about life.

The decisive moment in a man’s life is when he decides to confront death.

Sometimes it feels as if everything in life is just something we haul into the grave.

What's the point of our life? Everything seems absurd until we die, and then it makes sense.

Ultimately, I think, as humans, we all care deeply about our life's legacy, and contemplating our own mortality is the only real way to approach that question of legacy honestly.

Why does a person even get up in the morning? You have breakfast, you floss your teeth so you'll have healthy gums in your old age, and then you get in your car and drive down I-10 and die. Life is so stupid I can't stand it.

What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying.

One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.

Life is short, and therefore, one thing being certain, death, let us take up a great ideal, and give up the whole life to it. For what is the value of life, this vegetating little low life of man? Subordinating it to one high ideal is the only value that life has.

If death disappears there will be no mystery in life. That's why a dead thing has no mystery in it, a corpse has no mystery in it, because it cannot die anymore. You think it has no mystery because life has disappeared? No, it has no mystery because now it cannot die anymore. Death has disappeared, and with death automatically life disappears. Life is only one of the ways of death's expression.

If I must die, I will encounter darkness as a bride, and hug it in mine arms.

Is death that which gives meaning to life?