In benighted, incompetent Africa, I had never encountered an orphan: the American streets resembled nothing so much as one vast, howling, unprecedented orphanage. It has been vivid to me for many years that what we call a race problem here is not a race problem at all: to keep calling it that is a way of avoiding the problem. The problem is rooted in the question of how one treats one's flesh and blood, especially one's children.

The fact that their [the flower children's] uniforms and their jargons precisely represented the distances they had yet to cover before arriving at that maturity which makes love possible—or no longer possible—could not be considered their fault. They had been born into a society in which nothing was harder to achieve, in which perhaps nothing was more scorned and feared than the idea of the soul's maturity.

If you know from whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations on where you can go.

Wisely, Baldwin insisted that we are always more than our pain. Not only did he believe in our capacity to love, he felt black people were uniquely situated to risk loving because we had suffered.

I don't believe there's a white man in this country, baby, who can get his dick hard, without he hear some nigger moan.

To be liberated from the stigma of blackness by embracing it is to cease, forever, one's interior argument and collaboration with the authors of one's degradation. It abruptly reduces the white enemy to a contest merely physical, which he can win only physically.

Jimmy Baldwin was a whirlwind who stirred everything and everybody. He lived at a dizzying pace and I loved spinning with him.

İnsanlar her şeye kötü bir sıfat yakıştırmaktan hoşlanırlar. Bu sıfatları kullanmadıkları tek zaman, kendileriyle ilgili kötü bir şey anlattıkları zamanlardır.

Birden Giovanni'nin beni neden istediğini, neden bu son sığınağına getirdiğini anladım. Bu odayı yıkacak, Giovanni'ye yeni ve daha iyi bir yaşam armağan edecektim. Bu yaşam ancak benim kendi yaşamım olabilirdi ve Giovanni'nin yaşamını değiştirebilmesi için benim yaşamımın da bu odanın bir parçası olması gerekecekti.

I'm beginning to think,' she said, 'that growing means learning more and more about anguish. That poison becomes your diet-- you drink a little of it everyday. Once you've seen it, you can't stop seeing it-- that's the trouble. And it can, it can' -- she passed her hand wearily over her brown again-- 'drive you mad.