James Baldwin Quotes

A film like Genevieve to my contemporaries is not a film made years ago, but last week or last year. They see me as I was then, not as I am now. I am the reassurance that they have not changed. In an upside down world, with all the rules being rewritten as the game goes on and spectators invading the pitch, it is good to feel that some things and some people seem to stay just as they were.

For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen.

Sometimes people graduate but they don't leave. They hang around for years, for no reason. I would think of ghosts like that, I decided.

It stared at them, and it paused for a hundred years, which transpired in a dozen heart beats.

Wait and wait. Most people's lives are spent waiting.

To get nostalgic about other people's music, or even about your own, makes a terrible statement about the condition of your life and your prospects for the future.

The past seems to infuse into the present, and in the brown, wringled faces of the old people one sees the presence of the past.

Listen to John Coltrane enough and after two bars, just two bars at any place, and you know that's him. We all have signature things that happen to be similar that you can predict and you try to stay away from that except the rhythms: those pauses, they're part of my signature, the part where I know when I say nothing, I already painted enough, led enough and I don't even have to say anything. But those pauses don't belong to me. Jack Benny was one of the first guys in comedy to make the anticipation so great that during the pause people start to laugh before the execution.

Those were the people who made her something, and without them she was different. She'd held on to them and to that old self tenaciously, though. She clung to it, celebrated it, worshipped it even, instead of constructing a new grown-up life for herself. For years she'd been eating the cold crumbs left over from a great feast, living on them as though they could last her forever.

There are houses whose souls have passed into the limbo of Time, leaving their bodies in the limbo of London. Such was not quite the condition of Timothy's on the Bayswater Road, for Timothy's soul still had one foot in Timothy Forsyte's body, and Smither kept the atmosphere unchanging, of camphor and port wine and house whose windows are only opened to air it twice a day.

There was nothing new in sitting on this dock, on this or that wooden bench, watching for his boat to come. In some ways, she was always waiting for him.

I miss All Stars, by the way. I was just telling people: how am I going to get by until January?

I've been waiting for you forever." "Forever' as in several hundred years, or forever as in since my lesson began?

Old houses, I thought, do not belong to people ever, not really, people belong to them.

Can I tell you something? It wasn't so bad. Not so bad at all right then, me scowling at the dirt, James in his bed, the way it always always was. Look, if that's all that happened, if his dying just meant that I would be waiting for him to say something instead of listening to him say something, it would have been fine.

They all trying to say something with music that you can't say with plain talk. There ain't really no words for love or pain. And the way I see it, only fools go around trying to talk their love or talk their pain. So the smart people make music and you can kinda hear about it without them saying anything.

When we die, these are the stories still on our lips. The stories we’ll only tell strangers, someplace private in the padded cell of midnight. These important stories, we rehearse them for years in our head but never tell. These stories are ghosts, bringing people back from the dead. Just for a moment. For a visit. Every story is a ghost.

We're blues people. And blues never lets tragedy have the last word.

It's just one of those things. Everybody wants to do it, but it's really difficult. People had to wait for "Indy 4" for a decade, and the reason is because of the people involved.

Mia and I had been together for more than two years, and yes, it was a high school romance, but it was still the kind of romance where I thought we were trying to find a way to make it forever, the kind that, had we met five years later and had she not been some cello prodigy and had I not been in a band on the rise - or had our lives not been ripped apart by all this -I was pretty sure it would've been.

But there were years when, in search of what I thought was better, nobler things I denied these, my people, and my family. I forgot the songs they sung - and most of those songs are now dead; I erased their dialect from my tongue; I was ashamed of them and their ways of life. But now - yes, I love them; they are a part of my blood; they, with all their virtues and their faults, played a great part in forming my way of looking at life.

It is strange how we hold on to the pieces of the past while we wait for our futures.

So here I am - a 75-year-old man sitting on a bar stool in a blues club, trying to figure out exactly how I got here. Any way you look at it, it's a helluva story.

The desert wears... a veil of mystery. Motionless and silent it evokes in us an elusive hint of something unknown, unknowable, about to be revealed. Since the desert does not act it seems to be waiting -- but waiting for what?

Most people, you do a TV series, it ends three, four, five years later; it's a relic.