JAMES BALDWIN QUOTES V

American novelist (1960- )

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

Tags: night


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


Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.

JAMES BALDWIN

Esquire, April 1960

Tags: poverty


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


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


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

Tags: hate


Love was a country he knew nothing about.

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country


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


The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

JAMES BALDWIN

The Price of the Ticket

Tags: artists


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

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country

Tags: love


And the applause functions, then, in part, to pacify, narcotize, the resulting violent and inescapable discomfort.

JAMES BALDWIN

Just Above My Head


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


We had crossed from death into what certainly sounded like life. And not only did it sound like life, it looked like life; and not only did it look like life, it looked like a particular life, a life which was a particular reproach to me.

JAMES BALDWIN

Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone

Tags: life


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

Tags: racism


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

Tags: change


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


I don't like people who like me because I'm a Negro; neither do I like people who find in the same accident grounds for contempt.

JAMES BALDWIN

Autobiographical Notes

Tags: racism


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

Tags: history


Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, not current as far as I know in the language of any other people, which certainly does not mean what it says but betrays a nagging suspicion that something has been misplaced. I think now that if I had any intimation that the self I was going to find would turn out to be only the same self from which I had spent so much time in flight, I would have stayed at home.

JAMES BALDWIN

Giovanni's Room

Tags: America