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
My springs is getting rusty, sleeping single like I do.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
Why am I going home? he asked himself. But he knew why. It was time. In order not to lose all that he had gained, he had to move forward and risk it all.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
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
Heavenly witnesses are a tricky lot, to be used by whoever is closest to Heaven at the time. And legend and theology, which are designed to sanctify our fears, crimes, and aspirations, also reveal them for what they are.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Fire Next Time
Our dehumanization of the Negro then is indivisible from our dehumanization of ourselves: the loss of our own identity is the price we pay for our annulment of his.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
At the rate things are going here, all of Africa will be free before we can get a lousy cup of coffee.
JAMES BALDWIN
"A Negro Assays on the Negro Mood", New York Times, March 12, 1961
And then they walked through the town, in which not even a cat seemed to be moving; and everywhere they walked, the cathedral was watching them.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
JAMES BALDWIN
Giovanni's Room
The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Devil Finds Work
He had often watched her as she crossed the floor in her checkered apron, her face a dark mask behind which belligerence battled with humility. This was in her eyes which never for an instant lost their wariness and which were always ready, within a split second, to turn black and lightless with contempt.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
The taste for obscenity is universal and the appetite for reality rare and hard to cultivate.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
One of the most terrible, most mysterious things about a life is that a warning can be heeded only in retrospect: too late.
JAMES BALDWIN
If Beale Street Could Talk
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
She seemed to listen to life as though life were the most cunning and charming of confidence men: knowing perfectly well that she was being conned, she, nevertheless, again and again, gave the man the money for the Brooklyn Bridge. She never gained possession of the bridge, of course, but she certainly learned how to laugh. And the tiny lines in her face had been produced as much by laughter as by loss.
JAMES BALDWIN
Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone
Whenever he was uncomfortable -- which was often -- his arms and legs seemed to stretch to monstrous proportions and he handled them with bewildered loathing, as though he had been afflicted with them.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
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
Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.
JAMES BALDWIN
"In Search of a Majority"
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
You begin to see that you yourself, innocent, upright you, have contributed and do contribute to the misery of the world. Which will never end because we’re what we are.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country