JAMES BALDWIN QUOTES IX

American novelist (1960- )

Time: the whisper beneath that word is death.

JAMES BALDWIN

Just Above My Head

Tags: death


There is not a Negro alive who does not have this rage in his blood–one has the choice, merely, of living with it consciously or surrendering to it. As for me, this fever has recurred in me, and does, and will until the day I die.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: choice


Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.

JAMES BALDWIN

"As Much Truth As One Can Bear", New York Times Book Review, January 14, 1962


In any of the world’s cities, on a winter night, a boy can be bought for the price of a beer and the promise of warm blankets.

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country

Tags: beer


An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.

JAMES BALDWIN

The Fire Next Time

Tags: life


Yet one must also recognize that morality is based on ideas and that all ideas are dangerous—dangerous because ideas can only lead to action and where the action leads no man can say.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: ideas


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


In those days my mother was given to the exasperating and mysterious habit of having babies.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: habit


In the beginning—and neither can this be overstated—a Negro just cannot believe that white people are treating him as they do; he does not know what he has done to merit it. And when he realizes that the treatment accorded him has nothing to do with anything he has done, that the attempt of white people to destroy him—for that is what it is—is utterly gratuitous, it is not hard for him to think of white people as devils.

JAMES BALDWIN

The Fire Next Time

Tags: Merit


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

Tags: America


Yes, he had been there: chafing and pushing and pounding, trying to awaken a frozen girl. The battle was awful because the girl wished to be awakened but was terrified of the unknown. Every movement that seemed to bring her closer to him, to bring them closer together, had its violent recoil, driving them farther apart. Both clung to a fantasy rather than to each other, tried to suck pleasure from the crannies of the mind, rather than surrender the secrets of the body.

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country

Tags: fantasy


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


People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: innocence


People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: history


The tendrils of shame clutched at them, however they turned, all the dirty words they knew commented on all they did.

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country

Tags: shame


Our people" have functioned in this country for nearly a century as political weapons, the trump card up the enemies' sleeve; anything promised Negroes at election time is also a threat leveled at the opposition; in the struggle for mastery the Negro is the pawn.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: time


He did not seem to know enough about the people in his novel. They did not seem to trust him.

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country

Tags: trust


When my bed get empty, make me feel awful mean and blue.

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country


See, I couldn't stand these chicks I was making it with, and I was working real hard at my music, and man, I was lonely. You come off a gig, you be tired, and you'd already taken as much sh*t as you could stand from the managers and the people in the room you were working and you'd be off to make some down scene with some pasty white-faced b*tch. And so you'd make the scene and somehow you'd wake up in the morning and the chick would be beside you, alive and well, and dying to make the scene again and somehow you'd manage not to strangle her.

JAMES BALDWIN

Blues for Mister Charlie

Tags: working


The people who think of themselves as White have the choice of becoming human or irrelevant.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: choice