JAMES BALDWIN QUOTES IX

American novelist (1960- )

She fitted in my arms, she always had, and the shock of holding her caused me to feel that my arms had been empty since she had been away.

JAMES BALDWIN

Giovanni's Room


For I am—or I was—one of those people who pride themselves in on their willpower, on their ability to make a decision and carry it through. This virtue, like most virtues, is ambiguity itself. People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception. Their decisions are not really decisions at all—a real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things than can be named—but elaborate systems of evasion, of illusion, designed to make themselves and the world appear to be what they and the world are not.

JAMES BALDWIN

Giovanni's Room

Tags: ability


It is this image, living yet, which we perpetually seek to evade with good works; and this image which makes of all our good works an intolerable mockery.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son


The American image of the Negro lives also in the Negro's heart; and when he has surrendered to this image life has no other possible reality.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: life


Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.

JAMES BALDWIN

"As Much Truth As One Can Bear", New York Times Book Review, January 14, 1962


Perhaps I did not succumb to ideology ... because I have never seen myself as a spokesman. I am a witness.

JAMES BALDWIN

interview with Julius Lester, New York Times, May 27, 1984


Perhaps now, though, he had hit bottom. One thing about the bottom, he told himself, you can't fall any further. He tried to take comfort from this thought. Yet there knocked in his heart the suspicion that the bottom did not really exist.

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country

Tags: suspicion


But no one was interested in the facts. They preferred the invention because this invention expressed and corroborated their hates and fears so perfectly.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: invention


To smash something is the ghetto’s chronic need.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son


You don't have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.

JAMES BALDWIN

Giovanni's Room

Tags: home


Everyone wishes to be loved, but in the event, nearly no one can bear it. Everyone desires love but also finds it impossible to believe that he deserves it.

JAMES BALDWIN

Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone

Tags: love


The tendrils of shame clutched at them, however they turned, all the dirty words they knew commented on all they did.

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country

Tags: shame


It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first idea was acceptance, the acceptance, totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are: in the light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is a commonplace. But this did not mean that one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power: that one must never, in one's own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one's strength. This fight begins, however, in the heart and it now had been laid to my charge to keep my own heart free of hatred and despair. This intimation made my heart heavy and, now that my father was irrecoverable, I wished that he had been beside me so that I could have searched his face for the answers which only the future would give me now.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: life


People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: history


I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it. And I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it.

JAMES BALDWIN

The Fire Next Time

Tags: crime


Society is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void, within which, like the earth before the Word was spoken, the foundations of society are hidden.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: myth


Yes, he had been there: chafing and pushing and pounding, trying to awaken a frozen girl. The battle was awful because the girl wished to be awakened but was terrified of the unknown. Every movement that seemed to bring her closer to him, to bring them closer together, had its violent recoil, driving them farther apart. Both clung to a fantasy rather than to each other, tried to suck pleasure from the crannies of the mind, rather than surrender the secrets of the body.

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country

Tags: fantasy


Yet one must also recognize that morality is based on ideas and that all ideas are dangerous—dangerous because ideas can only lead to action and where the action leads no man can say.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: ideas


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

Tags: life


I often wonder what I'd do if there weren't any books in the world.

JAMES BALDWIN

Giovanni's Room

Tags: books