JAMES BALDWIN QUOTES VIII

American novelist (1960- )

But just as a society must have a scapegoat, so hatred must have a symbol.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: society


But that battered word, truth, having made its appearance here, confronts one immediately with a series of riddles and has, moreover, since so many gospels are preached, the unfortunate tendency to make one belligerent.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: appearance


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

Tags: love


It was the Lord who knew of the impossibility every parent in that room faced: how to prepare the child for the day when the child would be despised and how to create in the child - by what means? - a stronger antidote to this poison than one had found for oneself.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son


Most of us are about as eager to change as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.

JAMES BALDWIN

"As Much Truth As One Can Bear", New York Times Book Review, January 14, 1962

Tags: change


Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.

JAMES BALDWIN

"The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy", Esquire, May 1961

Tags: purity


People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.

JAMES BALDWIN

No Name in the Street

Tags: humanity


I bet you think we're in a g***am park. You don't know we're in one of the world's great jungles. You don't know that behind all them damn dainty trees and sh*t, people are screwing and fixing and dying. Dying, baby, right now while we move through this darkness in this man's taxicab. And you don't know it, even when you're told; you don't know it, even when you see it.

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country

Tags: trees


I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it. And I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it.

JAMES BALDWIN

The Fire Next Time

Tags: crime


Sometimes a minute can be a mighty powerful thing.

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country


The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.

JAMES BALDWIN

"The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy", Esquire, May 1961


You don't have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.

JAMES BALDWIN

Giovanni's Room

Tags: home


But no one was interested in the facts. They preferred the invention because this invention expressed and corroborated their hates and fears so perfectly.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: invention


It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first idea was acceptance, the acceptance, totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are: in the light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is a commonplace. But this did not mean that one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power: that one must never, in one's own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one's strength. This fight begins, however, in the heart and it now had been laid to my charge to keep my own heart free of hatred and despair. This intimation made my heart heavy and, now that my father was irrecoverable, I wished that he had been beside me so that I could have searched his face for the answers which only the future would give me now.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: life


To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.

JAMES BALDWIN

The Fire Next Time

Tags: life


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

Tags: silence


Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford.

JAMES BALDWIN

Giovanni's Room


Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: law


I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be "accepted" by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don't wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet.

JAMES BALDWIN

"Letter from a Region of My Mind", The New Yorker, November 17, 1962

Tags: racism


Society is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void, within which, like the earth before the Word was spoken, the foundations of society are hidden.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: myth