American novelist (1960- )
The taste for obscenity is universal and the appetite for reality rare and hard to cultivate.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
And then they walked through the town, in which not even a cat seemed to be moving; and everywhere they walked, the cathedral was watching them.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
You carry this pain around inside all day and all night long. No way to beat it--no way. But when I started getting high, I was cool, and it didn't bother me. And I wasn't lonely then, it was all right. And the chicks--I could handle them, they couldn't reach me. And I didn't know I was hooked--until I was hooked.
JAMES BALDWIN
Blues for Mister Charlie
It seems to be typical of life in America, where opportunities, real and fancied, are thicker than anywhere else on the globe, that the second generation has no time to talk to the first.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
Our dehumanization of the Negro then is indivisible from our dehumanization of ourselves: the loss of our own identity is the price we pay for our annulment of his.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.
JAMES BALDWIN
"Letter from a Region of My Mind", The New Yorker, November 17, 1962
Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Fire Next Time
You don't realize that you're intelligent until it gets you into trouble.
JAMES BALDWIN
interview with Julius Lester, New York Times, May 27, 1984
Perhaps now, though, he had hit bottom. One thing about the bottom, he told himself, you can't fall any further. He tried to take comfort from this thought. Yet there knocked in his heart the suspicion that the bottom did not really exist.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
The people who think of themselves as White have the choice of becoming human or irrelevant.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
Bigger dreams of some black man who will weld all blacks together into a mighty fist.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
Words like "freedom," "justice," "democracy" are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous and, above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Nation, July 7, 1956
Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.
JAMES BALDWIN
"In Search of a Majority"
And the applause functions, then, in part, to pacify, narcotize, the resulting violent and inescapable discomfort.
JAMES BALDWIN
Just Above My Head
Those kids aren't dumb. But the people who run these schools want to make sure they don't get smart: they are really teaching the kids to be slaves.
JAMES BALDWIN
If Beale Street Could Talk
Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty.
JAMES BALDWIN
Blues for Mister Charlie
One writes out of one thing only--one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
Whenever the Negro face appears a tension is created, the tension of a silence filled with things unutterable.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
And I was alone, had been for a while, and might be for a while, but it no longer frightened me the way it had. I was discovering something terrifyingly simple: there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. I was discovering this in the way, I suppose, that everybody does, but having tried, endlessly, to do something about it.
JAMES BALDWIN
Just Above My Head
It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Fire Next Time