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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Wash me, cried the slave to his Maker, and I shall be whiter, whiter than snow!
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Fire Next Time
The impossible is the least that one can demand.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Fire Next Time