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.
James A. Baldwin

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
James A. Baldwin

Those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.
James A. Baldwin

When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.
James A. Baldwin

Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.
James A. Baldwin

Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
James A. Baldwin

The writer's greed is appalling. He wants, or seems to want, everything and practically everybody, in another sense, and at the same time, he needs no one at all.
James A. Baldwin

Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock. James A. Baldwin

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.
James A. Baldwin

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.
James A. Baldwin

The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
James A. Baldwin

No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.
James A. Baldwin

You know, it's not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.
James A. Baldwin

It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.
James A. Baldwin

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

People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.
James A. Baldwin

The future is like heaven, everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now.
James A. Baldwin