James A. Baldwin Way Quotations

If you're treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they're real for you whether they're real or not.

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

how can one respect, let alone adopt, the values of a people who do not, on any level whatever, live the way they say they do, or the way they say they should?

A ghetto can be improved in one way only: out of existence.

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.

To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity.

There is no way of conveying to the corpse the reasons you have made him one--you have the corpse, and you are, thereafter, at themercy of a fact which missed the truth, which means that the corpse has you.

Allegiance, after all, has to work two ways; and one can grow weary of an allegiance which is not reciprocal.

You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don't live the only life you have, you won't live some other life, you won't live any life at all.

There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.

The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.