JAMES BALDWIN QUOTES VI

American novelist (1960- )

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


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


All over Harlem, Negro boys and girls are growing into stunted maturity, trying desperately to find a place to stand; and the wonder is not that so many are ruined but that so many survive.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: maturity


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


Out of joy strength came, strength that was fashioned to bear sorrow: sorrow brought forth joy. Forever? This was Ezekiel's wheel, in the middle of the burning air forever -- and the little wheel ran by faith, and the big wheel ran by the grace of God.

JAMES BALDWIN

Go Tell It on the Mountain

Tags: joy


It was a gesture of great despair and I knew that she was giving herself, not to me, but to that lover who would never come.

JAMES BALDWIN

Giovanni's Room

Tags: despair


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


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


The rebirth of the soul is perpetual; only rebirth every hour could stay the hand of Satan.

JAMES BALDWIN

Go Tell It on the Mountain

Tags: soul


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


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


Sometimes you hear a person speak the truth and you know that they are speaking the truth. But you also know that they have not heard themselves, do not know what they have said: do not know that they have revealed much more than they have said. This may be why the truth remains, on the whole, so rare.

JAMES BALDWIN

Just Above My Head

Tags: truth


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


Whenever we encounter him in the flesh, our faith is made perfect and his necessary and bloody end is executed with a mystical ferocity of joy.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: faith


My springs is getting rusty, sleeping single like I do.

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country


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


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 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


The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.

JAMES BALDWIN

The Fire Next Time

Tags: society


The impossible is the least that one can demand.

JAMES BALDWIN

The Fire Next Time