Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone Quotes

“Everyone wishes to be loved, but in the event, nearly no one can bear it. Everyone desires love but also finds it impossible to believe that he deserves it.”
― James Baldwin, Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone

“Some moments in a life, and they needn’t be very long or seem very important, can make up for so much in that life; can redeem, justify, that pain, that bewilderment, with which one lives, and invest one with the courage not only to endure it, but to profit from it; some moments teach one the price of the human connection: if one can live with one’s own pain, then one respects the pain of others, and so, briefly, but transcendentally, we can release each other from pain.”
― James Baldwin, Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone

“It’s painful, sometimes, to look back on a life and wonder if anything you did could have made any difference. So much is lost; and what’s lost is lost forever. Was it destined to be lost, or could we have saved it?”
― James Baldwin, Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone

“a boy with an unspeakable past was a man with an unendurable future. He was good to look at, good to dance with, probably good to sleep with: but he was no longer good for love.”
― James Baldwin, Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone

“Now, for the first time, I began to be aware of my heart, the heart itself: and with this awareness, conscious terror came. I realized that I knew nothing whatever about the way we are put together; and I realized that what I did not know might be in the process of killing me.”
― James Baldwin, Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone

“I went down again. My heart and I went down again. I was aware of her hand. I was aware of my breathing. I could no longer see it, but I was aware of her face.”
― James Baldwin, Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone

“If one can live with one's own pain then one respects the pain of others, and so, briefly, but transcendentally, we can release each other from pain.”
― James Baldwin, Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone

“I love you"
"Oh. Well. You have, you know, had better ideas.”
― James Baldwin, Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone

“It had come from nowhere. “We got stopped by the cops,” I said. Then I could not continue. I looked helplessly at Caleb and Caleb told the story. As Caleb spoke, I watched my father’s face. I don’t know how to describe what I saw. I felt the one arm he had around me tighten, tighten; his lips became bitter and his eyes grew dull. It was as though, after indescribable, nearly mortal effort, after grim years of fasting and prayer, after the loss of all he had, and after having been promised by the Almighty that he had paid the price and no more would be demanded of his soul, which was harbored now; it was as though in the midst of his joyful feasting and dancing, crowned and robed, a messenger arrived to tell him that a great error had been made, and that it was all to be done again.”
― James Baldwin, Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone

“I remembered my mother’s insistence that I always wear clean underwear because I might get knocked down by a car on the way to or from school and I and the family would be disgraced even beyond the grave, presumably, if my underwear was dirty. And I began to worry, in fact, as the doctor sniffed and prodded, about the state of the shorts I was wearing. This made me want to laugh. But I could not breathe.”
― James Baldwin, Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone

“There is a truth in the theater and there is a truth in life—they meet, but they are not the same, for life, God help us, is the truth. And those disguises which an artist wears are his means, not of fleeing from the truth, but of attempting to approach it.”
― James Baldwin, Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone

“If they had ever been represented, loved, by the people who had kidnapped and used them, they would not have had to spend so much of their youth evolving dubious strategies for self-defense.”
― James Baldwin, Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone

“a child’s major attention has to be concentrated on how to fit into a world which, with every passing hour, reveals itself as merciless.”
― James Baldwin, Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone

“I couldn’t stand Ronald Reagan, who looked like a pitchfork and had teeth like a ferret.”
― James Baldwin, Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone

“People who achieve any eminence whatever are driven to do so; and there is always something terribly vulnerable about such people. They very soon discover that their eminence makes of them an incitement and a target—it does not cause them to be loved. They are trapped on their hill. They cannot come down. They cannot bear obscurity as some organisms cannot bear light—death is what awaits them when they come down from the hill.”
― James Baldwin, Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone