Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.
James A. Baldwin

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

Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?
James A. Baldwin

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

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.
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

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

No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.
James A. Baldwin

Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
James A. Baldwin

Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.
James A. Baldwin

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
James A. Baldwin

People can cry much easier than they can change.
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

Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others. Pessimists are also people who think the human race is beneath their notice, that they're better than other human beings.
James A. Baldwin

The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.
James A. Baldwin

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

The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
James A. Baldwin

The noblest spirit is most strongly attracted by the love of glory.
James A. Baldwin

The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.
James A. Baldwin