JAMES BALDWIN QUOTES V

American novelist (1960- )

It is not Bigger whom we fear, since his appearance among us makes our victory certain. It is the others, who smile, who go to church, who give no cause for complaint, whom we sometimes consider with amusement, with pity, even with affection--and in whose faces we sometimes surprise the merest arrogant hint of hatred, the faintest, withdrawn, speculative shadow of contempt--who make us uneasy; whom we cajole, threaten, flatter, fear; who to us remain unknown, though we are not (we feel with both relief and hostility and with bottomless confusion) unknown to them.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: appearance


Bigger dreams of some black man who will weld all blacks together into a mighty fist.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: dreams


At the rate things are going here, all of Africa will be free before we can get a lousy cup of coffee.

JAMES BALDWIN

"A Negro Assays on the Negro Mood", New York Times, March 12, 1961

Tags: coffee


Love is not at the mercy of time and it does not recognize death, they are strangers to each other.

JAMES BALDWIN

Just Above My Head

Tags: death


He had often watched her as she crossed the floor in her checkered apron, her face a dark mask behind which belligerence battled with humility. This was in her eyes which never for an instant lost their wariness and which were always ready, within a split second, to turn black and lightless with contempt.

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country

Tags: contempt


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

Tags: racism


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

Tags: America


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

Tags: identity


Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, not current as far as I know in the language of any other people, which certainly does not mean what it says but betrays a nagging suspicion that something has been misplaced. I think now that if I had any intimation that the self I was going to find would turn out to be only the same self from which I had spent so much time in flight, I would have stayed at home.

JAMES BALDWIN

Giovanni's Room

Tags: America


The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

JAMES BALDWIN

The Price of the Ticket

Tags: artists


She seemed to listen to life as though life were the most cunning and charming of confidence men: knowing perfectly well that she was being conned, she, nevertheless, again and again, gave the man the money for the Brooklyn Bridge. She never gained possession of the bridge, of course, but she certainly learned how to laugh. And the tiny lines in her face had been produced as much by laughter as by loss.

JAMES BALDWIN

Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone

Tags: life


I pulled her to her feet. But, naked as I was, and holding her against me, I realized that I did not really feel for her what I had felt for Madeleine, whom I knew I did not love, several hours before. I felt a terrible constriction. It felt, I think, like death. I loved Barbara. I knew it then, and I really know it now; but what, I asked myself, was I to do with her?

JAMES BALDWIN

Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone

Tags: death


It must be remembered that the oppressed and the oppressor are bound together within the same society; they accept the same criteria, they share the same beliefs, they both alike depend on the same reality.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: reality


And the applause functions, then, in part, to pacify, narcotize, the resulting violent and inescapable discomfort.

JAMES BALDWIN

Just Above My Head


The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately.

JAMES BALDWIN

The Devil Finds Work

Tags: civilization


Society, it would seem, is a flimsy structure, beneath contempt, designed by and for all the other people, and experience is nothing more than sensation--so many sensations, added up like arithmetic, give one the rich, full life. They thus lose what it was they so bravely set out to find, their own personalities, which, having been deprived of all nourishment, soon cease, in effect, to exist; and they arrive, finally, at a dangerous disrespect for the personalities of others. They they persist in believing that their present shapelessness is freedom, it is observable that this present freedom is unable to endure either silence or privacy, and demands, for its ultimate expression, a rootless wandering among the cafés.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: freedom


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

Tags: intelligence


Sometimes you hear a person speak the truth and you know that they are speaking the truth. But you also know that they have not heard themselves, do not know what they have said: do not know that they have revealed much more than they have said. This may be why the truth remains, on the whole, so rare.

JAMES BALDWIN

Just Above My Head

Tags: truth


One of the most terrible, most mysterious things about a life is that a warning can be heeded only in retrospect: too late.

JAMES BALDWIN

If Beale Street Could Talk

Tags: life


My springs is getting rusty, sleeping single like I do.

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country