JAMES BALDWIN QUOTES VIII

American novelist (1960- )

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


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


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


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


Perhaps now, though, he had hit bottom. One thing about the bottom, he told himself, you can't fall any further. He tried to take comfort from this thought. Yet there knocked in his heart the suspicion that the bottom did not really exist.

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country

Tags: suspicion


It is really quite impossible to be affirmative about anything which one refuses to question; one is doomed to remain inarticulate about anything which one hasn’t, by an act of the imagination, made one’s own.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: imagination


Our people" have functioned in this country for nearly a century as political weapons, the trump card up the enemies' sleeve; anything promised Negroes at election time is also a threat leveled at the opposition; in the struggle for mastery the Negro is the pawn.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: time


People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: innocence


Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.

JAMES BALDWIN

"Letter from a Region of My Mind", The New Yorker, November 17, 1962

Tags: death


The American image of the Negro lives also in the Negro's heart; and when he has surrendered to this image life has no other possible reality.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: life


Time: the whisper beneath that word is death.

JAMES BALDWIN

Just Above My Head

Tags: death


An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.

JAMES BALDWIN

The Fire Next Time

Tags: life


But no one was interested in the facts. They preferred the invention because this invention expressed and corroborated their hates and fears so perfectly.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: invention


But that battered word, truth, having made its appearance here, confronts one immediately with a series of riddles and has, moreover, since so many gospels are preached, the unfortunate tendency to make one belligerent.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: appearance


Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford.

JAMES BALDWIN

Giovanni's Room


In the beginning—and neither can this be overstated—a Negro just cannot believe that white people are treating him as they do; he does not know what he has done to merit it. And when he realizes that the treatment accorded him has nothing to do with anything he has done, that the attempt of white people to destroy him—for that is what it is—is utterly gratuitous, it is not hard for him to think of white people as devils.

JAMES BALDWIN

The Fire Next Time

Tags: Merit


It is this image, living yet, which we perpetually seek to evade with good works; and this image which makes of all our good works an intolerable mockery.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son


People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget.

JAMES BALDWIN

Giovanni's Room

Tags: madness


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

JAMES BALDWIN

The Fire Next Time

Tags: society


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

Tags: working