JAMES BALDWIN QUOTES VII

American novelist (1960- )

People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.

JAMES BALDWIN

No Name in the Street

Tags: humanity


Nothing tamed or broke her, nothing touched her, neither kindness, nor scorn, nor hatred, nor love. She had never thought of prayer. It was unimaginable that she would ever bend her knees and come crawling along a dusty floor to anybody’s altar.

JAMES BALDWIN

Go Tell It on the Mountain

Tags: kindness


The people who think of themselves as White have the choice of becoming human or irrelevant.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: choice


It was better not to judge the man who had gone down under an impossible burden. It was better to remember: Thou knowest this man's fall, but thou knowest not his wrassling.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son


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

JAMES BALDWIN

The Fire Next Time

Tags: society


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


Negro life is in fact as debased and impoverished as our theology claims.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: life


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


For I am—or I was—one of those people who pride themselves in on their willpower, on their ability to make a decision and carry it through. This virtue, like most virtues, is ambiguity itself. People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception. Their decisions are not really decisions at all—a real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things than can be named—but elaborate systems of evasion, of illusion, designed to make themselves and the world appear to be what they and the world are not.

JAMES BALDWIN

Giovanni's Room

Tags: ability


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


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

Tags: change


Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the field of battle.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: ability


In those days my mother was given to the exasperating and mysterious habit of having babies.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: habit


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


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

Tags: change


The impossible is the least that one can demand.

JAMES BALDWIN

The Fire Next Time


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

Tags: pain


Sometimes a minute can be a mighty powerful thing.

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country


I bet you think we're in a g***am park. You don't know we're in one of the world's great jungles. You don't know that behind all them damn dainty trees and sh*t, people are screwing and fixing and dying. Dying, baby, right now while we move through this darkness in this man's taxicab. And you don't know it, even when you're told; you don't know it, even when you see it.

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country

Tags: trees


Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: law