JAMES BALDWIN QUOTES V

American novelist (1960- )

You carry this pain around inside all day and all night long. No way to beat it--no way. But when I started getting high, I was cool, and it didn't bother me. And I wasn't lonely then, it was all right. And the chicks--I could handle them, they couldn't reach me. And I didn't know I was hooked--until I was hooked.

JAMES BALDWIN

Blues for Mister Charlie

Tags: night


We had crossed from death into what certainly sounded like life. And not only did it sound like life, it looked like life; and not only did it look like life, it looked like a particular life, a life which was a particular reproach to me.

JAMES BALDWIN

Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone

Tags: life


One of the most American of attributes: the inability to believe that time is real. It is this inability which makes them so romantic about the nature of society, and it is this inability which has led them into a total confusion about the nature of experience.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: nature


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

JAMES BALDWIN

If Beale Street Could Talk

Tags: love


It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate.

JAMES BALDWIN

The Fire Next Time

Tags: hate


I remember what it was ... to be young, very young. When everything, touching and tasting--everything--was so new, and even suffering was wonderful because it was so complete.

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country

Tags: suffering


I guess it can’t be too often that two people can laugh and make love, too, make love because they are laughing, laugh because they’re making love. The love and the laughter come from the same place: but not many people go there.

JAMES BALDWIN

If Beale Street Could Talk

Tags: love


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


They do not believe there can be tears between men. They think we are only playing a game and that we do it to shock them.

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country

Tags: Men


It is not Bigger whom we fear, since his appearance among us makes our victory certain. It is the others, who smile, who go to church, who give no cause for complaint, whom we sometimes consider with amusement, with pity, even with affection--and in whose faces we sometimes surprise the merest arrogant hint of hatred, the faintest, withdrawn, speculative shadow of contempt--who make us uneasy; whom we cajole, threaten, flatter, fear; who to us remain unknown, though we are not (we feel with both relief and hostility and with bottomless confusion) unknown to them.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: appearance


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


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


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


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


Love was a country he knew nothing about.

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country


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

Tags: racism


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


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


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


He stopped. He had not liked the book. He could not take it seriously. It was an able, intelligent, mildly perceptive tour de force and it would never mean anything to anyone.

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country