American novelist (1960- )
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
Ain't no such thing as a little fault or a big fault. Satan get his foot in the door, he ain't going to rest till he's in the room.
JAMES BALDWIN
Go Tell It on the Mountain
The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality—for this touchstone can be only oneself.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Fire Next Time
It is really quite impossible to be affirmative about anything which one refuses to question; one is doomed to remain inarticulate about anything which one hasn’t, by an act of the imagination, made one’s own.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
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
Most people had not lived -- nor could it, for that matter, be said that they had died-- through any of their terrible events. They had simply been stunned by the hammer. They passed their lives thereafter in a kind of limbo of denied and unexamined pain.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
His mind was like the sea itself: troubled, and too deep for the bravest man's descent, throwing up now and again, for the naked eye to wonder at, treasure and debris long forgotten on the bottom—bones and jewels, fantastic shells, jelly that had once been flesh, pearls that had once been eyes. And he was at the mercy of this sea, hanging there with darkness all around him.
JAMES BALDWIN
Go Tell It on the Mountain
She fitted in my arms, she always had, and the shock of holding her caused me to feel that my arms had been empty since she had been away.
JAMES BALDWIN
Giovanni's Room
Sometimes a minute can be a mighty powerful thing.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
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
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
I don't like people who like me because I'm a Negro; neither do I like people who find in the same accident grounds for contempt. 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. I think all theories are suspect, that the finest principles may have to be modified, or may even be pulverized by the demands of life, and that one must find, therefore, one's own moral center and move through the world hoping that this center will guide one aright. I consider that I have many responsibilities, but none greater than this: to last, as Hemingway says, and get my work done.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
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
Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the field of battle.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
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
It was better not to judge the man who had gone down under an impossible burden. It was better to remember: Thou knowest this man's fall, but thou knowest not his wrassling.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story. It is a story which otherwise has yet to be told and which no American is prepared to hear. As is the inevitable result of things unsaid, we find ourselves until today oppressed with a dangerous and reverberating silence.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
Perhaps I did not succumb to ideology ... because I have never seen myself as a spokesman. I am a witness.
JAMES BALDWIN
interview with Julius Lester, New York Times, May 27, 1984
My springs is getting rusty, sleeping single like I do.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.
JAMES BALDWIN
"Letter from a Region of My Mind", The New Yorker, November 17, 1962