James Baldwin

"The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, justice and compassion will become only words."

"Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have."

"It is only when a man begins to live that he begins to learn."

"We made the world we're living in and we have to make it over."

"If we do not risk anything we risk everything."

"The questions are not really important, beloved; only you are important, only that fair, full, blessed weight of your attention."

"I owe you nothing and you owe me nothing but love."

"I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, then all at once."

"One day, to everyone's surprise, including my own, I fell in love."

"Think of the world you carry within you."

"Time is a tyrant. I think it must be, necessarily, since we are not free of it."

"The future is like heaven—everyone exalts it but no one wants to go there now."

"Being a Negro in America means trying to be human under circumstances that do not make this easy."

"The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that very existence is an act of rebellion."

"I use the word love not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being."

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

"Talent is something, but persistence is everything."

"One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often."

"The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but rather the reality of the thing."

"Knowledge, incontestably, is power."

"It is hard for me to believe that an artist can ever be satisfied, since art comes out of a human need to express what is not."

"The church then, to stay alive, must be not less prophetic but more so."

"I'm not interested in the middle ground—in something which is neither hot nor cold, which doesn't engage the reader."

"Do not rely on institutions. They will fail you. Rely on friends."

"I had quite a different, more immediate sense of my place in the world when I was a young man."

"There is no greater distance than the distance between two people who love each other and cannot touch."

"The details of my life have been chosen before I was born, partly from the impulse of Africa—perhaps."

"I, for example, have chosen to believe something which millions of people are not able to believe."

"The effort to understand cannot itself be the barrier to understanding."

"What you see is what you see. The rest is philosophy."