To be with God is really to be involved in some enormous, overwhelming desire, and joy, and power which you cannot control, which controls you.
James A. BaldwinThe relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others in order to end the racial nightmare and acheive our country.
James A. BaldwinIt is hard for anyone under twenty to realise that death has already assigned them a number, which is going to come up one day.
James A. BaldwinBut to look back from the stony plain along the road which led one to that place is not at all the same thing as walking on the road; the perspective to say the very least, changes only with the journey; only when the road has, all abruptly and treacherously, and with an absoluteness that permits no argument, turned or dropped or risen is one able to see all that one could not have seen from any other place.
James A. Baldwin