American novelist (1960- )
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
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
But that battered word, truth, having made its appearance here, confronts one immediately with a series of riddles and has, moreover, since so many gospels are preached, the unfortunate tendency to make one belligerent.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
He did not seem to know enough about the people in his novel. They did not seem to trust him.
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
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
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
The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Fire Next Time
We cannot escape our origins, however hard we try, those origins which contain the key--could we but find it--to all we later become.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
You don't have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.
JAMES BALDWIN
Giovanni's Room
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.
JAMES BALDWIN
Autobiographical Notes
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 are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
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
This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
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
The American image of the Negro lives also in the Negro's heart; and when he has surrendered to this image life has no other possible reality.
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 he is a fool or a coward but almost everybody is one or the other and most people are both.
JAMES BALDWIN
Giovanni's Room
The Negro’s real relation to the white American ... prohibits, simply, anything as uncomplicated and satisfactory as pure hatred. In order really to hate white people, one has to blot so much out of the mind––and the heart––that this hatred itself becomes an exhausting and self-destructive pose. But this does not mean, on the other hand, that love comes easily: the white world is too powerful, too complacent, too ready with gratuitous humiliation, and, above all, too ignorant and too innocent for that.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son