American novelist (1960- )
It is the question of Bigger's humanity which is at stake, the relationship in which he stands to all other Americans--and, by implication, to all people--and it is precisely this question which it cannot clarify, with which it cannot, in fact, come to any coherent terms. He is the monster created by the American republic, the present awful sum of generations of oppression; but to say that he is a monster is to fall into the trap of making him subhuman and he must, therefore, be made representative of a way of life which is real and human in precise ratio to the degree to which it seems to us monstrous and strange.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
Love was a country he knew nothing about.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
Folks can change their ways much as they want to. But I don’t care how many times you change your ways, what’s in you is in you, and it’s got to come out.
JAMES BALDWIN
Go Tell It on the Mountain
You don't realize that you're intelligent until it gets you into trouble.
JAMES BALDWIN
interview with Julius Lester, New York Times, May 27, 1984
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
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
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
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
It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Fire Next Time
The trouble with a secret life is that it is very frequently a secret from the person who lives it and not at all a secret for the people he encounters. He encounters, because he must encounter, those people who see his secrecy before they see anything else, and who drag these secrets out of him; sometimes with the intention of using them against him, sometimes with more benevolent intent; but, whatever the intent, the moment is awful and the accumulating revelation is an unspeakable anguish.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
His dangerous, overwhelming lust for life had failed to involve him in anything deeper than perhaps half a dozen extremely casual acquaintanceships in about as many bars.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
They do not believe there can be tears between men. They think we are only playing a game and that we do it to shock them.
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
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
And I was alone, had been for a while, and might be for a while, but it no longer frightened me the way it had. I was discovering something terrifyingly simple: there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. I was discovering this in the way, I suppose, that everybody does, but having tried, endlessly, to do something about it.
JAMES BALDWIN
Just Above My Head
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
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
Society, it would seem, is a flimsy structure, beneath contempt, designed by and for all the other people, and experience is nothing more than sensation--so many sensations, added up like arithmetic, give one the rich, full life. They thus lose what it was they so bravely set out to find, their own personalities, which, having been deprived of all nourishment, soon cease, in effect, to exist; and they arrive, finally, at a dangerous disrespect for the personalities of others. They they persist in believing that their present shapelessness is freedom, it is observable that this present freedom is unable to endure either silence or privacy, and demands, for its ultimate expression, a rootless wandering among the cafés.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
He stopped. He had not liked the book. He could not take it seriously. It was an able, intelligent, mildly perceptive tour de force and it would never mean anything to anyone.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
And the applause functions, then, in part, to pacify, narcotize, the resulting violent and inescapable discomfort.
JAMES BALDWIN
Just Above My Head