James Baldwin Quotes

Apathy is a sort of living oblivion.

I have a very strong feeling that the opposite of love is not hate - it's apathy. It's not giving a damn.

I said 'It can't go on' and he said 'No, it can't.' Honestly, I don't think I could have mattered less to him by then. But by then, nothing mattered to him.

I can't say I love football anymore.

(Beth) "I don't care anymore." I turned my face up toward Heaven. "That's not my home anymore. You are.

My own apathy is bone chilling.

One day, you don't feel like doing anything. Nothing interests you, everything bores you. Feel more and more empty inside, more and more dissatisfied with yourself and the world in general. Then even that feeling wears off, and you don't feel anything anymore. You become completely indifferent to what goes on around you... You forget how to laugh and cry - you're cold inside and incapable of loving anything or anyone... There's no going back... The disease has a name. It's called deadly tedium.

Apathy is the self-defense of the powerless.

Such has often been my apathy, when objects long sought, and earnestly desired, were placed within my reach.

He didn't like very many people any more, or very many things either. He preferred not to be this way, but there it was, he was like that. His cynicism, a veteran's cynicism, was a thing that disturbed him all the time.

Depressive lucidity, usually described as a radical withdrawal from ordinary human concerns, generally manifests itself by a profound indifference to things which are genuinely of minor interest. Thus it is possible to imagine a depressed lover, while the idea of a depressed patriot seems frankly inconceivable.

To be apathetic is literally to be without passion.

People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone.

I can’t seem to make myself care about anything to the right or left of the present.

I found myself losing interest in almost everything, I didn't want to do any of the things I had previously wanted to do and I didn't know why. Everything there was to do seemed like too much work. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality, and it was vitality that seemed to seep away from me in that moment.

I didn't care about anything. And there's a freedom in apathy, a wild, dizzying liberation on which you can almost get drunk. You can do anything. Ask Kevin.

It means nothing to me. I have no opinion about it, and I don't care.

I used to say that the newspapers were tomorrow's fish and chip paper, but I didn't really mean it; I could still be hurt by what they said. After Athens, I just didn't care.

I used to think that cruelty required malice, but that is not true. Jeanine has no reason to act out of malice. But she is cruel because she doesn't care what she does, as long as it fascinates her. I may as well be a puzzle or a broken machine she wants to fix. She will break open my skull just to see the inner workings of my brain; I will die here, and that will be the merciful thing.

I think we've unplugged and become very apathetic to a lot of things that are happening. There's so much going on and we're sort of disconnected.

Killing myself was a matter of such indifference to me that I felt like waiting for a moment when it would make some difference.

Sometimes I didn't even feel like getting out of bed. I took to wearing my days-of-the-week panties out of order. It could be Monday and I'd have on underwear saying Thursday. I just didn't care.

Indifference is the strongest force in the universe. It makes everything it touches meaningless. Love and hate don't stand a chance against it.

The world belongs to who doesn't feel. The primary condition to be a practical man is the absence of sensitivity.

My boredom with everything has numbed me.