American novelist (1960- )
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
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
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
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
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
You haven’t got to be in love every time you go to bed.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
JAMES BALDWIN
Esquire, April 1960
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
Love brought you here. If you trusted love this far, don't panic now.
JAMES BALDWIN
If Beale Street Could Talk
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
All over Harlem, Negro boys and girls are growing into stunted maturity, trying desperately to find a place to stand; and the wonder is not that so many are ruined but that so many survive.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
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
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
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
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 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
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
You took the best, so why not take the rest?
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
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
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