JAMES BALDWIN QUOTES VI

American novelist (1960- )

The trouble with a secret life is that it is very frequently a secret from the person who lives it and not at all a secret for the people he encounters. He encounters, because he must encounter, those people who see his secrecy before they see anything else, and who drag these secrets out of him; sometimes with the intention of using them against him, sometimes with more benevolent intent; but, whatever the intent, the moment is awful and the accumulating revelation is an unspeakable anguish.

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country

Tags: secret


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


Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex. You thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did.

JAMES BALDWIN

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

Tags: money


You don’t know, and there’s no way in the world for you to find out, what it’s like to be a black girl in this world, and the way white men, and black men, too, baby, treat you.

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country

Tags: Men


I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: America


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


But don’t lose heart, dear ones -- don’t lose heart. Don’t let it make you bitter. Try to understand. Try to understand. The world’s already bitter enough, we got to try to be better than the world.

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country


In overlooking, denying, evading this complexity--which is nothing more than the disquieting complexity of ourselves--we are diminished and we perish; only within this web of ambiguity, paradox, this hunger, danger, darkness, can we find at once ourselves and the power that will free us from ourselves.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: danger


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


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

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: society


I come out of streets where life itself--life itself!--depends on timing more infinitesimal than the split second, where apprehension must be swifter than the speed of light.

JAMES BALDWIN

Just Above My Head

Tags: life


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

Tags: experience


Wash me, cried the slave to his Maker, and I shall be whiter, whiter than snow!

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: snow


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


The menfolk, they die, all right. And it's us women who walk around, like the Bible says, and mourn. The menfolk, they die, and it's over for them, but we women, we have to keep on living and try to forget what they done to us.

JAMES BALDWIN

Go Tell It on the Mountain

Tags: women


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 best that he had ever managed in bed, so far, had been the maximum of relief with the minimum of hostility.

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country


But there is a complementary faith among the damned which involves their gathering of the stones with which those who walk in the light shall stone them; or there exists among the intolerably degraded the perverse and powerful desire to force into the arena of the actual those fantastic crimes if which they have been accused, achieving their vengeance and their own destruction through making the nightmare real.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: desire


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


Nothing tamed or broke her, nothing touched her, neither kindness, nor scorn, nor hatred, nor love. She had never thought of prayer. It was unimaginable that she would ever bend her knees and come crawling along a dusty floor to anybody’s altar.

JAMES BALDWIN

Go Tell It on the Mountain

Tags: kindness