JAMES BALDWIN QUOTES VIII

American novelist (1960- )

The people who think of themselves as White have the choice of becoming human or irrelevant.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: choice


Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: law


It is really quite impossible to be affirmative about anything which one refuses to question; one is doomed to remain inarticulate about anything which one hasn’t, by an act of the imagination, made one’s own.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: imagination


In any of the world’s cities, on a winter night, a boy can be bought for the price of a beer and the promise of warm blankets.

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country

Tags: beer


Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford.

JAMES BALDWIN

Giovanni's Room


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


People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget.

JAMES BALDWIN

Giovanni's Room

Tags: madness


Our people" have functioned in this country for nearly a century as political weapons, the trump card up the enemies' sleeve; anything promised Negroes at election time is also a threat leveled at the opposition; in the struggle for mastery the Negro is the pawn.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: time


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


Most people had not lived -- nor could it, for that matter, be said that they had died-- through any of their terrible events. They had simply been stunned by the hammer. They passed their lives thereafter in a kind of limbo of denied and unexamined pain.

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country

Tags: pain


Time: the whisper beneath that word is death.

JAMES BALDWIN

Just Above My Head

Tags: death


The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.

JAMES BALDWIN

The Fire Next Time

Tags: society


An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.

JAMES BALDWIN

The Fire Next Time

Tags: life


The roles that we construct are constructed because we feel that they will help us to survive and also, of course, because they fulfill something in our personalities; and one does not, therefore, cease playing a role simply because one has begun to understand it.... The world tends to trap you in the role you play and it is always extremely hard to maintain a watchful, mocking distance between oneself as one appears to be and oneself as one actually is.

JAMES BALDWIN

"The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy", Esquire, May 1961


People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: innocence


But that battered word, truth, having made its appearance here, confronts one immediately with a series of riddles and has, moreover, since so many gospels are preached, the unfortunate tendency to make one belligerent.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: appearance


In the beginning—and neither can this be overstated—a Negro just cannot believe that white people are treating him as they do; he does not know what he has done to merit it. And when he realizes that the treatment accorded him has nothing to do with anything he has done, that the attempt of white people to destroy him—for that is what it is—is utterly gratuitous, it is not hard for him to think of white people as devils.

JAMES BALDWIN

The Fire Next Time

Tags: Merit


Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.

JAMES BALDWIN

"Letter from a Region of My Mind", The New Yorker, November 17, 1962

Tags: death


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


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