James Baldwin Quotes

You’re too important to just … die.” He shakes his head. He won’t even look at me—his eyes keep shifting across my face, to the wall behind me or the ceiling above me, to everything but me. I am too stunned to be angry. “I’m not important. Everyone will do just fine without me,” I say. “Who cares about everyone? What about me?

I feel myself becoming less a person than a place, inhabited, a foreign land.

Fool that I am," said he,"that I did not tear out my heart the day I resolved to revenge myself".

all day long wearing a hat that wasn't on my head

I also am other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness.

A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don’t get to choose our own hearts. We can’t make ourselves want what’s good for us or what’s good for other people. We don’t get to choose the people we are.

If you're going to maintain any kind of self-respect, you're going to have to keep secrets from yourself.

Men and women aren't really dogs: they only look like it and behave like it. Somewhere inside there is a great chagrin and a gnawing discontent.

I almost do not exist now and I know it; God knows what lives in me in place of me.

I believe I once considerably scandalized her by declaring that clear soup was a more important factor in life than a clear conscience.

The worst injury is feeling you don't belong so much / to you.

You can run for cover, you can run for help. You can run to your lover, but you can't ever run from yourself.

For ever, I shall be a stranger to myself.

for my grief's so great That no supporter but the huge firm earth Can hold it up: here I and sorrows sit; Here is my throne, bid kings come bow to it. (Constance, from King John, Act III, scene 1)

You will find that our enemies are our own kin. It is they who betray us. So learn this most important lesson-in the end, our worst enemy is ourselves

But it's a sad man my friend who's livin' in his own skin And can't stand the company. Every fool's got a reason to feelin' sorry for himself And turn his heart to stone. Tonight this fool's halfway to heaven and just a mile outta hell And I feel like I'm comin' home.

Even though I'm seventeen, I guess I still thought this would always be true - that there would always be that lost-and-found, and not the lost-and-still-lost that I am now trapped inside.

People hide their truest nature. I understood that; I even applauded it. What sort of world would it be if people bled all over the sidewalks, if they wept under trees, smacked whomever they despised, kissed strangers, revealed themselves?

I don't want my Patronus to be a monkey! Even though that's totally what it is.

There is this feeling that I have a destiny far away from the shallow and preposterous posing that is our life.

Exhibitionism and a nervous wish for concealment, for anonymity, thus battle inside the buyer of any piece of clothing.

But after a moment a sense of waste and ruin overcame him. There they were, close together and safe and shut in; yet so chained to their separate destinies that they might as well been half the world apart.

We were exiles from reality that summer. We were refugees from ourselves.

Sunday was always the best of days for being the self you had intended to be, but were not, for one reason or another.