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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 12e93c3 | What kind of friendship have you had? Or for that matter...what kind of love affairs? | James Baldwin | ||
| ecd4cc1 | If your countrymen think that privacy is a crime, so much the worse for your country. | James Baldwin | ||
| 7620ee3 | Confession Who knows more of Wanda, the wan, than I do? And who knows more of Terry, the torn, than I do? And who knows more than I do of Ziggy, the Zap, fleeing the rap, using his eyes and teeth to spring the trap, than I do! Or did. Good Lord, forbid that morning's acre, held in the palm | James Baldwin | ||
| 8fc1487 | It was as though I were yelling up to Heaven and Heaven would not hear me. And if Heaven would not hear me- to wash me, to make me clean- then utter disaster was my portion. | James Baldwin | ||
| 52c6cf2 | Have you been to the police?' Richard asked. 'Yes.' She made a gesture of disgust and rose and walked to the window. 'They said it happens all the time - coloured men running off from their families. They said they'd try to find him. But they don't care. They don't care what happens - to a black man!' 'Oh, well, now,' cried Richard, his face red, 'is that fair? I mean, hell, I'm sure they'll look for him just like they look for any other ci.. | James Baldwin | ||
| df97dd4 | Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is growing up. ~James Baldwin | K. Langston | ||
| 574cf4d | your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour--and in the oddest places!--for the lack of it. | James Baldwin | ||
| d15b99f | Don't you see how unjust it was to wait for me to find it out? To put all the burden on me? I had the right to expect to hear from you--women are always waiting for the man to speak. | James Baldwin | ||
| a64feb5 | I was often allowed to watch them drink their cocktails. | James Baldwin | ||
| 7d2d141 | 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. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death--ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the con.. | James Baldwin | ||
| 05def1a | 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. The | James Baldwin | ||
| 8cec7d4 | That was how I met Giovanni. I think we connected the instant that we met. And remain connected still, in spite of our later separation de corps, despite the fact that Giovanni will be rotting soon in unhallowed ground near Paris. Until I die there will be those moments, moments seeming to rise up out of the ground like Macbeth's witches, when his face will come before me, that face in all its changes, when the exact timbre of his voice and.. | James Baldwin | ||
| ba58388 | 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. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death--ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the con.. | James Baldwin | ||
| 76aad5c | The South very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live, and have lived here, are so ugly that now they cannot even speak to one another. It does not demand much reflection to be appalled at the inevitable state of mind achieved by people who dare not speak freely about those things which most disturb them. | James Baldwin | ||
| 50aa6a0 | Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them. | James Baldwin | ||
| 1318200 | That door is the gateway he has sought so long out of this dirty world, this dirty body. It's getting late. 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. When I wa.. | James Baldwin | ||
| e816d7e | Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one's sense of one's own reality. Well, the black man has functioned in the white man's world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar: and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations. | James Baldwin | ||
| aa0c897 | The idea that students don't know how to write clearly and precisely is as old as school itself, probably, but lately it seems as if students no longer know how to read either. It is true on my campus and from I can gather, on many other college campuses. The students understand words, sentences -- they are not illiterate -- but they don't seem to grasp the reasons for reading. They seem baffled when asked to take two thoughts, connect them.. | students | Dinty W. Moore | |
| cb9a166 | Yes, Mama. I'm going to try to love the Lord." At this there sprang into his mother's face something startling, beautiful, unspeakably sad--as though she were looking far beyond him at a long, dark road, and seeing on that road a traveler in perpetual danger. Was it he, the traveler? or herself? or was she thinking of the cross of Jesus?" | James Baldwin | ||
| b5844f8 | Lord, that Hollywood train, forever coming round the bend! | trains | James Baldwin | |
| 4dec89a | Negroes are Americans and their destiny is the country's destiny. They have no other experience besides their experience on this continent and it is an experience which cannot be rejected, which yet remains to be embraced. If, as I believe, no American Negro exists who does not have his private Bigger Thomas living in the skull, then what most significantly fails to be illuminated here is the paradoxical adjustment which is perpetually made.. | James Baldwin | ||
| c7ae126 | The treatment accorded the Negro during the Second World War marks, for me, a turning point in the Negro's relation to America. To put it briefly, and somewhat too simply, a certain hope died, a certain respect for white Americans faded. One began to pity them, or to hate them. You must put yourself in the skin of a man who is wearing the uniform of his country, is a candidate for death in its defense, and who is called a "nigger" by his co.. | James Baldwin | ||
| fb19c8a | For, without love, pleasure withers quickly, becomes a foul taste on the palate, and pleasure's inventions are soon exhausted. There must be a soul within the body you are holding, a soul which you are striving to meet, a soul which is striving to meet yours. | passion sex soul | James Baldwin | |
| c1fc342 | The root of the black man's hatred is rage, and he does not so much hate white men as simply wants them out of his way, and, more than that, out of his children's way. | James Baldwin | ||
| bbb7014 | Now, for the first time, I began to be aware of my heart, the heart itself: and with this awareness, conscious terror came. I realized that I knew nothing whatever about the way we are put together; and I realized that what I did not know might be in the process of killing me. | James Baldwin | ||
| 48f6197 | I remembered my mother's insistence that I always wear clean underwear because I might get knocked down by a car on the way to or from school and I and the family would be disgraced even beyond the grave, presumably, if my underwear was dirty. And I began to worry, in fact, as the doctor sniffed and prodded, about the state of the shorts I was wearing. This made me want to laugh. But I could not breathe. | emergency underwear | James Baldwin | |
| 6d2967f | This laughter is the laughter of those who consider themselves to be at a safe remove from all the wretched, for whom the pain of living is not real. ... this laughter is universal and never can be stilled. | James Baldwin | ||
| e915338 | I was also able to see that the principles governing the rites and customs of the churches in which I grew up did not differ from the principles governing the rites and customs of other churches, white. The principles were Blindness, Loneliness, and Terror, the first principle necessarily and actively cultivated in order to deny the two others. I would love to believe that the principles were Faith, Hope, and Charity, but this is clearly no.. | James Baldwin | ||
| f918178 | 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. Heroes are rare. | James Baldwin | ||
| 0894937 | But white Americans do not believe in death, and this is why the darkness of my skin so intimidates them. | James Baldwin | ||
| 1f8b3fa | The brutality with which Negroes are treated in this country simply cannot be overstated, however unwilling white men may be to hear it. In | James Baldwin | ||
| 7a9c9e6 | For the horrors of the American Negro's life there has been almost no language. | James Baldwin | ||
| ba979de | I am proud of these people not because of their color but because of their intelligence and their spiritual force and their beauty. The country should be proud of them, too, but, alas, not many people in this country even know of their existence. And the reason for this ignorance is that a knowledge of the role these people played--and play--in American life would reveal more about America to Americans than Americans wish to know. | James Baldwin | ||
| 21374b5 | The paradox--and a fearful paradox it is--is that the American Negro can have no future anywhere, on any continent, as long as he is unwilling to accept his past. To accept one's past--one's history--is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought. How can the American Negro's past be used? The unpre.. | James Baldwin | ||
| 13d682e | When I watched all the children, their copper, brown, and beige faces staring up at me as I taught Sunday school, I felt that I was committing a crime in talking about the gentle Jesus, in telling them to reconcile themselves to their misery on earth in order to gain the crown of eternal life. Were only Negroes to gain this crown? Was Heaven, then, to be merely another ghetto? Perhaps I might have been able to reconcile myself even to this .. | James Baldwin | ||
| d0371ca | The real reason that nonviolence is considered to be a virtue in Negroes-- I am not speaking now of its racial value, another matter altogether-- is that white men do not want their lives, their self-image, or their property threatened. One wishes they would say so more often. | racism | James Baldwin | |
| 89ecd73 | It is considered a rather cheerful axiom that all Americans distrust politicians. (No one takes the further and less cheerful step of considering just what effect this mutual contempt has on either the public or the politicians, who have, indeed, very little to do with one another.) | americans contempt distrust politicians politics trust united-states usa | James Baldwin | |
| 95cfc06 | It is a fact that every American Negro bears a name that originally belonged to the white man whose chattel he was. I am called Baldwin because I was either sold by my African tribe or kidnapped out of it into the hands of a white Christian named Baldwin, who forced me to kneel at the foot of the cross. I am, then, both visibly and legally the descendant of slaves in a white, Protestant country, and this is what it means to be an American N.. | James Baldwin | ||
| 322a5bb | Well, hell, if people keep telling you you ain't no good' - she [Leona] tried to laugh - 'you bound to turn out pretty bad. | James Baldwin | ||
| 167011b | 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 | ||
| b093ae8 | Malcolm--the world's much more like me than it is like you. People recognize me. They see me in their mirror. But they don't hardly ever see you. You're not in the mirror with them. | James Baldwin | ||
| f86fd19 | You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason. The limits of your ambition were, thus, expected to be set forever. 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. | James Baldwin | ||
| 2b60b92 | With this fearful intimation there opened in me a hatred for Giovanni which was as powerful as my love and which was nourished by the same roots. | James Baldwin | ||
| f567aa4 | They knew that no one heard, that bloodless people cannot be made to bleed. So they blew what everyone had heard before, they reassured everyone that nothing terrible was happening. | James Baldwin |