American novelist (1960- )
To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Fire Next Time
Is adoration a blasphemy or the key to life, to life eternal, our weight in the balance of the grace of God? (Must Jesus bear the cross alone!)
JAMES BALDWIN
Just Above My Head
When he was dead I realized that I had hardly ever spoken to him. When he had been dead a long time I began to wish I had.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
The Negro’s real relation to the white American ... prohibits, simply, anything as uncomplicated and satisfactory as pure hatred. In order really to hate white people, one has to blot so much out of the mind––and the heart––that this hatred itself becomes an exhausting and self-destructive pose. But this does not mean, on the other hand, that love comes easily: the white world is too powerful, too complacent, too ready with gratuitous humiliation, and, above all, too ignorant and too innocent for that.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
The first love disappears, but never goes. That ache becomes reconciliation.
JAMES BALDWIN
Just Above My Head
Love forces, at last, this humility: you cannot love if you cannot be loved, you cannot see if you cannot be seen.
JAMES BALDWIN
Just Above My Head
The universe, which is not merely the stars and the moon and the planets, flowers, grass and trees, but other people, has evolved no terms for your existence, has made no room for you, and if love will not swing wide the gates, no other power will or can. And if one despairs-- as who has not?-- of human love, God's love alone is left.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Fire Next Time
Perhaps he is a fool or a coward but almost everybody is one or the other and most people are both.
JAMES BALDWIN
Giovanni's Room
Time is just common, it's like water for a fish. Everybody's in this water, nobody gets out of it, or if he does the same thing happens to him that happens to the fish, he dies. And you know what happens in this water, time? The big fish eat the little fish. That's all. The big fish eat the little fish and the ocean doesn't care.
JAMES BALDWIN
Giovanni's Room
It is a sentimental error ... to believe that the past is dead.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
I often wonder what I'd do if there weren't any books in the world.
JAMES BALDWIN
Giovanni's Room
Whoever is born in New York is ill-equipped to deal with any other city: all other cities seem, at best, a mistake, and, at worst, a fraud.
JAMES BALDWIN
Just Above My Head
When my bed get empty, make me feel awful mean and blue.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
There is not a Negro alive who does not have this rage in his blood–one has the choice, merely, of living with it consciously or surrendering to it. As for me, this fever has recurred in me, and does, and will until the day I die.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
All women had been cursed from the cradle; all, in one fashion or another, being given the same cruel destiny, born to suffer the weight of men.
JAMES BALDWIN
Go Tell It on the Mountain
It is a matter of embracing one's only life, even though this life so often seems to be, merely, one's doom. And it is, in a way, though not "merely." But to refuse the doom of one's only life is to be trapped outside all nourishment.
JAMES BALDWIN
Just Above My Head
I was an interloper; this was not my heritage. At the same time I had no other heritage which I could possibly hope to use––I had certainly been unfitted for the jungle or the tribe. I would have to appropriate these white centuries, I would have to make them mine––I would have to accept my special attitude, my special place in this scheme––otherwise I would have no place in any scheme. What was the most difficult was the fact that I was forced to admit something I had always hidden from myself, which the American Negro has had to hide from himself as the price of his public progress; that I hated and feared white people.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
Oedipus did not remember the thongs that bound his feet; nevertheless the marks they left testified to that doom toward which his feet were leading him.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.
JAMES BALDWIN
Esquire, April 1960