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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| c272d30 | The rage of the disesteemed is personally fruitless, but it is also so absolutely inevitable; this rage, so generally discounted, so little understood even among the people whose daily bread it is, is one of the things that makes history. Rage can only with difficulty, and never entirely, be brought under the domination of the intelligence and is therefore not susceptible to any arguments whatever. | anger blacks prejudice race race-relations racism rage | James Baldwin | |
| b4194ac | For this village, even were it incomparably more remote and incredibly more primitive, is the West, the West onto which I have been so strangely grafted. These people cannot be, from the point of view of power, strangers anywhere in the world; they have made the modern world, in effect, even if they do not know it. The most illiterate among them is related, in a way that I am not, to Dante, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Aeschylus, Da Vinci, Re.. | James Baldwin | ||
| eff0496 | Uncle Tom's Cabin, then, is activated by what might be called a theological terror, the terror of damnation; and the spirit that breathes in this book, hot, self-righteous, fearful, is not different from that spirit of medieval times which sought to exorcize evil by burning witches; and is not different from that terror which activates a lynch mob. | James Baldwin | ||
| 1ca339f | Do you come in here often?" asked Giovanni suddenly. "No," I said, "not very often." "But you will come," he teased, with a wonderful, mocking light on his face, "more often now?" I stammered: "Why?" "Ah!" cried Giovanni. "Don't you know when you have made a friend?" I knew I must look foolish and that my question was foolish too: "So soon?" "Why no," he said, reasonably, and looked at his watch, "we can wait another hour if you like. We ca.. | James Baldwin | ||
| 0513dc3 | Neither civilized reason nor Christian love would cause any of those people to treat you as they presumably wanted to be treated; only the fear of your power to retaliate would cause them to do that, or to seem to do it, which was (and is) good enough. | James Baldwin | ||
| 3e349ef | To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger. | James Baldwin | ||
| d5c6477 | And then, again, I was undergoing with my father what the very young inevitability undergo with their elders: I was beginning to judge him. And the very harshness of this judgement, which broke my heart, revealed, though I could not have said it then, how much I had loved him, how that love, along with my innocence, was dying. | James Baldwin | ||
| ff1304e | The fear that I heard in my father's voice... when he realized that I really believed I could do, anything a white boy could do, and had every intention of proving it, was not at all like the fear I heard when one of us was ill or had fallen down the stairs or strayed too far from the house. It was another fear, a far that the child, in challenging the white world's assumptions, was putting himself in the path of destruction. | James Baldwin | ||
| d971b08 | Perhaps we were, all of us -pimps, whores, racketeers, church members, and children -bound together by the nature of our oppression, the specific and peculiar complex of risks we had to run; if so, within these limits we sometimes achieved with each other a freedom that was close to love. I remember, anyway, church suppers and outing, and later, after I left the church, rent and waistline parties where rage and sorrow sat in the darkness an.. | James Baldwin | ||
| 8bc31b9 | There are tears on his face, his face or mine, I don't know. I kiss him where our tears fall. I start to say something. He puts one finger on my lips. He smiles his little smile. | James Baldwin | ||
| 67a93ff | To know a thing you must see it first, and to see you must look with an open mind. | James Baldwin | ||
| 0b7300f | Suddenly, sitting at the window, and with a violence unprecedented, there arose in John a flood of fury and tears, and he bowed his head, fists clenched against the windowpane, crying, with teeth on edge: "What shall I do? What shall I do?" | James Baldwin | ||
| b42c818 | But as long as we in the West place on color the value that we do, we make it impossible for the great unwashed to consolidate themselves according to any other principle. Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality. | James Baldwin | ||
| 8ec4418 | He prayeth best, who loveth best All things both great and small; For the dear God who loveth us, He made and loveth all. | James Baldwin | ||
| 89c8e90 | The gap between white and black education, income, and mortality rates is as wide today as it was forty years ago.6 If you look into a hospital nursery and see a black infant and a white infant, you can predict which baby will die first, which one will make a higher income and have better education, just by the color of the baby's skin. There is no area in American society (education, incarceration, income, preaching, and so on) where racia.. | William H. Willimon | ||
| d676f60 | If you think of them as dirty, then they be dirty- they will be dirty because you will be giving nothing | James Baldwin | ||
| 568d79e | These captive men are the hidden price for a hiden lie: the righteous must be able to locate the damned. | James Baldwin | ||
| 6add576 | the righteous must be able to locate the damned. | James Baldwin | ||
| 8f668bf | The body in the mirror forces me to turn and face it. And I look at my body, which is under sentence of death. It is lean, hard, and cold, the incarnation of a mystery. And I do not know what moves in this body, what this body is searching. It is trapped in my mirror as it is trapped in time and it hurries toward revelation. | James Baldwin | ||
| f0847c6 | Other people cannot see what I see whenever I look into your father's face, for behind your father's face as it is today are all those other faces which were his. | knowing-others sense-of-self | James Baldwin | |
| d82e290 | You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity. | disparities race-in-america race-relations racism systematic-oppression systematic-racism | James Baldwin | |
| 49b62f2 | Furthermore, it is now absolutely clear that white people are a minority in the world--so severe a minority that they now look rather more like an invention--and that they cannot possibly hope to rule it any longer. If this is so, why is it not also possible that they achieved their original dominance by stealth and cunning and bloodshed and in opposition to the will of Heaven, and not, as they claim, by Heaven's will? | James Baldwin | ||
| c2bf7d8 | Any honest examination of the national life proves how far we are from the standard of human freedom with which we began. The recovery of this standard demands of everyone who loves this country a hard look at himself, for the greatest achievements must begin somewhere, and they always begin with the person. If we are not capable of this examination, we may yet become one of the most distinguished and monumental failures in the history of n.. | James Baldwin | ||
| fe90085 | Though we do not wholly believe it yet, the interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world. --James Baldwin | Roland Merullo | ||
| 63f56c0 | But the policemen were doing nothing now. Obviously, this was not because they had become more human but because they were under orders and because they were afraid. And indeed they were, and I was delighted to see it. There they stood, in twos and threes and fours, in their Cub Scout uniforms and with their Cub Scout faces, totally unprepared, as is the way with American he-men, for anything that could not be settled with a club or a fist .. | James Baldwin | ||
| 88080ba | Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. 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 on.. | James Baldwin | ||
| 72de1bd | They went on working for the promise of a pension and their "health benefits," which was ironic in that almost any other job would benefit their health better than any doctor's pills." -- | James Baldwin | ||
| d1c0f35 | You stop that,' he said, in a voice which he did not recognise. 'You stop that. You stop trying to kill me. It's not my fault I'm white. It's not my fault you're black. It's not my fault he's dead. | James Baldwin | ||
| 8ca11dc | We are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms - up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested3 - probably once belonged to Shakespeare. A billion more each came from Buddha and Genghis Khan and Beethoven, and any other historical figure you care to name. (The personages have to be historical, apparently, as it takes the atoms some decades to become thoroughly redistribu.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| f1911d5 | What happened was that, all unconscious of what this ennui meant, I wearied of the motion, wearied of the jobless seas of alcohol, wearied of the blunt, bluff, hearty, and totally meaningless friendships wearied of wandering through the forests of desperate women, wearied of the work which fed me only in the most brutally literal sense. Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, not current as far.. | James Baldwin | ||
| 66ff040 | Nothing ever goes away | James Baldwin | ||
| 67269aa | I steal by lawns and grassy plots, I slide by hazel 6 covers; I move the sweet forget-me-nots That grow for happy lovers. I slip, I slide, I gloom, 7 I glance, Among my skimming swallows; I make the netted sunbeams dance Against my shady shallows. | James Baldwin | ||
| 54b7891 | I moved, looking for a cigarette. They were in my hand. I lit one. In a moment, I thought, I will say something. I will say something and then I will walk out of this room forever. | leaving | James Baldwin | |
| 5ab37ac | Afro-Americans. Which is but a wedding, however, of two confusions, an arbitrary linking of two undefined and currently undefinable proper nouns. I mean that, in the case of Africa, Africa is still chained to Europe, and exploited by Europe, and Europe and America are chained together; and as long as this is so, it is hard to speak of Africa except as a cradle and a potential. Not until the many millions of people on the continent of Africa.. | no-name-in-the-street | James Baldwin | |
| f3c4899 | But the Negro's experience of the white world cannot possibly create in him any respect for the standards by which the white world claims to live. | James Baldwin | ||
| 13554e6 | Nevertheless, beneath me--along the river bank, beneath the bridges, in the shadow of the walls, I could almost hear the collective, shivering sigh--were lovers and ruins, sleeping, embracing, coupling, drinking, staring out at the descending night. Behind the walls of the houses I passed, the French nation was clearing away the dishes, putting little Jean Pierre and Marie to bed, scowling over the eternal problems of the sou, the shop, the.. | James Baldwin | ||
| 7336995 | The burden of his salvation seemed to be on me and I could not endure it. | James Baldwin | ||
| 13734e3 | Ages ago, in another city, on another bus, I sat so at the windows, looking outward, inventing for each flying face which trapped my brief attention some life, some destiny, in which I played a part. I was looking for some whisper, or promise, of my possible salvation. But it seemed to me that morning that my ancient self had been dreaming the most dangerous dream of all. | James Baldwin | ||
| 5335626 | When my fingers began, involuntarily, to loose their hold on Hella, I realized that I was dangling from a high place and that I had been clinging to her for my very life. With each moment, as my fingers slipped, I felt the roaring air beneath me and felt everything in me bitterly contracting, crawling furiously upward against that long fall. | James Baldwin | ||
| 1a8e01e | I must believe, I must believe, that the heavy grace of God, which has brought me to this point, is all that can carry me out of it. | James Baldwin | ||
| 63d7549 | John looked with a child's impenetrable gravity into the preacher's face, as though he were turning this question over in his mind and would answer when he had thought it | James Baldwin | ||
| c662fb5 | We go down the hall again, thank heaven, to my drink. | drink | James Baldwin | |
| b052f5f | We are all androgynous, not only because we are all born of a woman impregnated by the seed of a man but because each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other - male in female, female in male, white in black and black in white. We are a part of each other. Many of my countrymen appear to find this fact exceedingly inconvenient and even unfair, and so very often do I. But none of us can do anything about it. James Baldwin, "Here Be .. | John A. Powell | ||
| 92fa66d | To act is to be committed and to be committed is to be in danger. | James Baldwin |