Quote

There are people in the world for whom coming along is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.

James A. Baldwin

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

James A. Baldwin
Never
World
People
Arrive
Destined
Perpetual
Along
Coming
Process

More quotes by James A. Baldwin

Image
When the South has trouble with its Negroes - when the Negroes refuse to remain in their place - it blames outside agitators and Northern interference. When the nation has trouble with the Northern Negro, it blames the Kremlin.
James A. Baldwin
Image
The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
James A. Baldwin
Image
It is astonishing that in a country so devoted to the individual, so many people should be afraid to speak.
James A. Baldwin
Image
It is impossible to pretend that you are not heir to, and therefore, however inadequately or unwillingly, responsible to, and for, the time and place that give you life -- without becoming, at very best, a dangerously disoriented human being.
James A. Baldwin
Image
The hope of the world lies in what one demands, not of others, but of oneself.
James A. Baldwin
Image
The noblest spirit is most strongly attracted by the love of glory.
James A. Baldwin
Image
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.
James A. Baldwin
Image
To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity.
James A. Baldwin
Image
Women manage, quite brilliantly, on the whole, and to stunning and unforeseeable effect, to survive and surmount being defined by others. They dismiss the definition, however dangerous or wounding it may be-- or even, sometimes, find a way to utilize it.
James A. Baldwin
Image
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
James A. Baldwin
Image
Each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other - male in female, female in male, white in black, and black in white. We are part of each other. Many of my countrymen appear to find this fact exceedingly inconvenient and even unfair, and so, very often, do I. But none of us can do anything about it.
James A. Baldwin
Image
The impossible is the least that one can demand.
James A. Baldwin
Image
I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.
James A. Baldwin
Image
I think that the inability to love is the central problem, because that inability masks a certain terror, and that terror is the terror of being touched. And if you can't be touched, you can't be changed. And if you can't be changed, you can't be alive.
James A. Baldwin
Image
A real writer is always shifting and changing and searching.
James A. Baldwin
Image
There is something terribly radical about believing that one's own experience and images are important enough to speak about, much less to write about and to perform
James A. Baldwin
Image
Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands we have no right to assume otherwise. If we do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.
James A. Baldwin
Image
You don't realize that you're intelligent until it gets you into trouble.
James A. Baldwin
Image
People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become, and they pay for it, very simply, by the lives they lead.
James A. Baldwin
Image
The trick is to love somebody.... If you love one person, you see everybody else differently.
James A. Baldwin