James Baldwin

Those who say it can’t be done are usually interrupted by others doing it

It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian.

Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did.

An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.

The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.

The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did - which was to hide.

The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.

Every human being must have a point at which he stands against the culture, where he says, this is me and the damned world can go to hell.

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.

Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.