JAMES BALDWIN QUOTES IV

American novelist (1960- )

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

Tags: thought


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


You haven’t got to be in love every time you go to bed.

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country

Tags: love


Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.

JAMES BALDWIN

Giovanni's Room


All over Harlem, Negro boys and girls are growing into stunted maturity, trying desperately to find a place to stand; and the wonder is not that so many are ruined but that so many survive.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: maturity


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


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"

Tags: love


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


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


I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am, also, much more than that. So are we all.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: history


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


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


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

JAMES BALDWIN

The Devil Finds Work

Tags: civilization


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


You took the best, so why not take the rest?

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country


Love brought you here. If you trusted love this far, don't panic now.

JAMES BALDWIN

If Beale Street Could Talk

Tags: love


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

Tags: kids


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

Tags: respect


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


Heavenly witnesses are a tricky lot, to be used by whoever is closest to Heaven at the time. And legend and theology, which are designed to sanctify our fears, crimes, and aspirations, also reveal them for what they are.

JAMES BALDWIN

The Fire Next Time

Tags: Heaven