American novelist (1960- )
Love was a country he knew nothing about.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
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
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
The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
JAMES BALDWIN
"The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy", Esquire, May 1961
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
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
The people who think of themselves as White have the choice of becoming human or irrelevant.
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
The impossible is the least that one can demand.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Fire Next Time
His dangerous, overwhelming lust for life had failed to involve him in anything deeper than perhaps half a dozen extremely casual acquaintanceships in about as many bars.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
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
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
Those kids aren't dumb. But the people who run these schools want to make sure they don't get smart: they are really teaching the kids to be slaves.
JAMES BALDWIN
If Beale Street Could Talk
Sometimes a minute can be a mighty powerful thing.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
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
Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty.
JAMES BALDWIN
Blues for Mister Charlie
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
Passion is terrifying, it can rock you, change you, bring your head under, as when a wind rises from the bottom of the sea, and you're out there in the craft of your mortality, alone.
JAMES BALDWIN
Just Above My Head
I can conceive of no Negro native to this country who has not, by the age of puberty, been irreparably scarred by the conditions of his life.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
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