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“So that any writer, looking back over even so short a span of time as I am here forced to assess, finds that the things which hurt him and the things which helped him cannot be divorced from each other; he could be helped in a certain way only because he was hurt in a certain way; and his help is simply to be enabled to move from one conundrum to the next—one is tempted to say that he moves from one disaster to the next.”
― James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

“It is really quite impossible to be affirmative about anything which one refuses to question; one is doomed to remain inarticulate about about anything which one hasn’t, by an act of the imagination, made one’s own.”
― James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

“Every man in the chapel hoped that when his hour came he, too, would be eulogized, which is to say forgiven, and that all of his lapses, greeds, errors, and strayings from the truth would be invested with coherence and looked upon with charity. This was perhaps the last thing humans could give each other and it was what they demanded, after all, of the Lord.”
― James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

“But our humanity is our burden, our life; we need not battle for it; we need only to do what is infinitely more difficult—that is, accept it.”
― James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son