American novelist (1960- )
Yet, if the American Negro has arrived at his identity by virtue of the absoluteness of his estrangement from his past, American white men still nourish the illusion that there is some means of recovering the European innocence, of returning to a state in which black men do not exist. This is one of the greatest errors Americans can make. The identity they fought so hard to protect has, by virtue of that battle, undergone a change: Americans are as unlike any other white people in the world as it is possible to be.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
Whenever we encounter him in the flesh, our faith is made perfect and his necessary and bloody end is executed with a mystical ferocity of joy.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
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
Of course, I must say that I don't think America is God's gift to anybody -- if it is, God's days have got to be numbered.
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
There are people in the world for whom "coming along" is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.
JAMES BALDWIN
Go Tell It on the Mountain
When the white man came to Africa, the white man had the Bible and the African had the land, but now it is the white man who is being, reluctantly and bloodily, separated from the land, and the African who is still attempting to digest or to vomit up the Bible.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Fire Next Time
I conceive of God, in fact, as a means of liberation and not a means to control others.
JAMES BALDWIN
address delivered at Kalamazoo College, February 1960
You took the best, so why not take the rest?
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
I was in a terrible confusion. Sometimes I thought, but this is your life. Stop fighting it. Stop fighting. Or I thought, but I am happy. And he loves me. I am safe. Sometimes, when he was not near me, I thought, I will never let him touch me again. Then, when he touched me, I thought it doesn’t matter, it is only the body, it will soon be over. When it was over I lay in the dark and listened to his breathing and dreamed of the touch of hands, of Giovanni’s hands, or anybody’s hands, hands which would have the power to crush me and make me whole again.
JAMES BALDWIN
Giovanni's Room
I can conceive of no Negro native to this country who has not, by the age of puberty, been irreparably scarred by the conditions of his life.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed the collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace, that Americans have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors, that American men are the world's most direct and virile, that American women are pure. Negroes know far more about white Americans than that; it can almost be said, in fact, that they know about white Americans what parents—or, anyway, mothers—know about their children, and that they very often regard white Americans that way.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Fire Next Time
The taste for obscenity is universal and the appetite for reality rare and hard to cultivate.
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
Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
JAMES BALDWIN
Giovanni's Room
Something like lust, something like hatred, seems to hover in the air along the country roads, shifting like mist or steam, but always there, gripping the city streets like fog, making every corner a dangerous corner.
JAMES BALDWIN
Just Above My Head
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
The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Fire Next Time
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"
You haven’t got to be in love every time you go to bed.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country