JAMES BALDWIN QUOTES III

American novelist (1960- )

People don't have any mercy. They tear you limb from limb, in the name of love. Then, when you're dead, when they've killed you by what they made you go through, they say you didn't have any character. They weep big, bitter tears - not for you. For themselves, because they've lost their toy.

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country

Tags: character


Yet, if the American Negro has arrived at his identity by virtue of the absoluteness of his estrangement from his past, American white men still nourish the illusion that there is some means of recovering the European innocence, of returning to a state in which black men do not exist. This is one of the greatest errors Americans can make. The identity they fought so hard to protect has, by virtue of that battle, undergone a change: Americans are as unlike any other white people in the world as it is possible to be.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: identity


The betrayal of a belief is not the same thing as ceasing to believe. If this were not so there would be no moral standards in the world at all.

JAMES BALDWIN

The Price of the Ticket

Tags: belief


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


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

Tags: age


Something like lust, something like hatred, seems to hover in the air along the country roads, shifting like mist or steam, but always there, gripping the city streets like fog, making every corner a dangerous corner.

JAMES BALDWIN

Just Above My Head

Tags: lust


You carry this pain around inside all day and all night long. No way to beat it--no way. But when I started getting high, I was cool, and it didn't bother me. And I wasn't lonely then, it was all right. And the chicks--I could handle them, they couldn't reach me. And I didn't know I was hooked--until I was hooked.

JAMES BALDWIN

Blues for Mister Charlie

Tags: night


We all commit our crimes. The thing is to not lie about them -- to try to understand what you have done, why you have done it. That way, you can begin to forgive yourself. That's very important. If you don't forgive yourself you'll never be able to forgive anybody else and you'll go on committing the same crimes forever.

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country


There are people in the world for whom "coming along" is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.

JAMES BALDWIN

Go Tell It on the Mountain


The taste for obscenity is universal and the appetite for reality rare and hard to cultivate.

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country

Tags: reality


The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.

JAMES BALDWIN

The Fire Next Time

Tags: faith


One of the most American of attributes: the inability to believe that time is real. It is this inability which makes them so romantic about the nature of society, and it is this inability which has led them into a total confusion about the nature of experience.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: nature


I remember what it was ... to be young, very young. When everything, touching and tasting--everything--was so new, and even suffering was wonderful because it was so complete.

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country

Tags: suffering


You haven’t got to be in love every time you go to bed.

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country

Tags: love


When the white man came to Africa, the white man had the Bible and the African had the land, but now it is the white man who is being, reluctantly and bloodily, separated from the land, and the African who is still attempting to digest or to vomit up the Bible.

JAMES BALDWIN

The Fire Next Time


The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed the collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace, that Americans have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors, that American men are the world's most direct and virile, that American women are pure. Negroes know far more about white Americans than that; it can almost be said, in fact, that they know about white Americans what parents—or, anyway, mothers—know about their children, and that they very often regard white Americans that way.

JAMES BALDWIN

The Fire Next Time

Tags: children


It seems to be typical of life in America, where opportunities, real and fancied, are thicker than anywhere else on the globe, that the second generation has no time to talk to the first.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: America


I was in a terrible confusion. Sometimes I thought, but this is your life. Stop fighting it. Stop fighting. Or I thought, but I am happy. And he loves me. I am safe. Sometimes, when he was not near me, I thought, I will never let him touch me again. Then, when he touched me, I thought it doesn’t matter, it is only the body, it will soon be over. When it was over I lay in the dark and listened to his breathing and dreamed of the touch of hands, of Giovanni’s hands, or anybody’s hands, hands which would have the power to crush me and make me whole again.

JAMES BALDWIN

Giovanni's Room

Tags: thought


I guess it can’t be too often that two people can laugh and make love, too, make love because they are laughing, laugh because they’re making love. The love and the laughter come from the same place: but not many people go there.

JAMES BALDWIN

If Beale Street Could Talk

Tags: love


I conceive of God, in fact, as a means of liberation and not a means to control others.

JAMES BALDWIN

address delivered at Kalamazoo College, February 1960

Tags: God