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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 1017ef5 | I wanted to say so many things. Yet when I opened my mouth, I made no sound. And yet - I do not know what I felt for Giovanni. I felt nothing for Giovanni, I felt terror and pity and a rising lust. | James Baldwin | ||
| 65d4f15 | An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are. He has to tell, because nobody else in the world | artists emotion growth life revelation spirituality writers writing | James Baldwin | |
| 64884f3 | But our humanity is our burden, our life; we need not battle for it; we need only to do what is infinitely more difficult--that is, accept it. | James Baldwin | ||
| 46ce210 | One is absolutely forced to make perpetual qualifications and one's own reactions are always canceling each other out. It is this, really, which has driven so many people mad, both white and black. One is always in the position of having to decide between amputation and gangrene. Amputation is swift but time may prove that amputation was not necessary--or one may delay the amputation too long. Gangrene is slow, but it is I,possible to be su.. | James Baldwin | ||
| 5359d88 | It is axiomatic that the Negro is religious, which is to say that he stands in fear of the God our ancestors gave us and before whom we all tremble yet. There are probably more churches in Harlem than in any other ghetto in this city and they are going full blast every night and some of them are filled with praying people every day. This, supposedly, exemplifies the Negro's essential simplicity and good-will; but it is actually a fairly des.. | James Baldwin | ||
| 757f234 | Their faith may be described as childlike, but the end it serves is often sinister. It may, indeed, "keep them happy"--a phrase carrying the inescapable inference that the way of life imposed on Negroes makes them quite actively unhappy--but also, and much more significantly, religion operates here as a complete and exquisite fantasy revenge: white people own the earth and commit all manner of abomination and injustice on it; the bad will b.. | James Baldwin | ||
| b3f8a2b | It was the Lord who knew of the impossibility every parent in that room faced: how to prepare the child for the day when the child would be despised and how to create in the child - by what means? - a stronger antidote to this poison than one had found for oneself. | James Baldwin | ||
| 0e0a306 | but the African has not yet endured the utter alienation of himself from his people and his past. His mother did not sing "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child," and he has not, all his life long, ached for acceptance in a culture which pronounced straight hair and white skin the only acceptable beauty. They face each other, the Negro and the African, over a gulf of three hundred years - an alienation too vast to be conquered in an even.. | James Baldwin | ||
| 926b4ad | Any society inevitably produces its criminals, but a society at once rigid and unstable can do nothing whatever to alleviate the poverty of its lowest members, cannot present to the hypothetical young man at the crucial moment that so-well-advertised right path. | James Baldwin | ||
| b8f5e94 | I don't think the negro problem can be discussed coherently without bearing in mind its context; its context being the history, traditions, customs, the moral assumptions and preoccupations of the country; in short, the general social fabric. Appearances to the contrary, no one in America escapes its effects and everyone in America bears some responsibility for it. I believe this the more firmly because it is the overwhelming tendency to sp.. | James Baldwin | ||
| 5a6b3f6 | So that any writer, looking back over even so short a span of time as I am here forced to assess, finds that the things which hurt him and the things which helped him cannot be divorced from each other; he could be helped in a certain way only because he was hurt in a certain way; and his help is simply to be enabled to move from one conundrum to the next--one is tempted to say that he moves from one disaster to the next. | James Baldwin | ||
| 90a752f | The people who think of themselves as White have the choice of becoming human or irrelevant. | James Baldwin | ||
| a975665 | consider that I have many responsibilities, but none greater than this: to last, as Hemingway says, and get my work done. I want to be an honest man and a good writer. | James Baldwin | ||
| e2f0dc7 | I consider that I have many responsibilities, but none greater than this: to last, as Hemingway says, and get my work done. I want to be an honest man and a good writer. | James Baldwin | ||
| b2d0d02 | In America, it is true, the appearance is perpetually changing, each generation greeting with short-lived exultation yet more dazzling additions to our renowned facade. But the ghetto, anxiety, bitterness, and guilt continue to breed their indescribable complex of tensions. What time will bring Americans is at last their own identity. It is on this dangerous voyage and in the same boat that the American Negro will make peace with himself an.. | James Baldwin | ||
| d7bcb24 | social affairs are not generally speaking the writer's prime concern, whether they ought to be or not; it is absolutely necessary that he establish between himself and these affairs a distance which will allow, at least, for clarity, so that before he can look forward in any meaningful sense, he must first be allowed to take a long look back. | James Baldwin | ||
| 3317004 | Every man in the chapel hoped that when his hour came he, too, would be eulogized, which is to say forgiven, and that all of his lapses, greeds, errors, and strayings from the truth would be invested with coherence and looked upon with charity. This was perhaps the last thing humans could give each other and it was what they demanded, after all, of the Lord. | death eulogies forgiveness funerals generosity remembrance | James Baldwin | |
| 0a204c6 | the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly. | James Baldwin | ||
| 2ccd22f | Up to today we are set at a division, so that he may not marry our daughters or our sisters, nor may he--for the most part--eat at our tables or live in our houses. Moreover, those who do, do so at the grave expense of a double alienation: from their own people, whose fabled attributes they must either deny or, worse, cheapen and bring to market; from us, for we require of them, when we accept them, that they at once cease to be Negroes and.. | James Baldwin | ||
| 9d5dce7 | The story of my childhood is the usual bleak fantasy, and we can dismiss it with the restrained observation that I certainly would not consider living it again. In those days my mother was given to the exasperating and mysterious habit of having babies. As they were born, I took them over with one hand and held a book with the other. The children probably suffered, though they have since been kind enough to deny it, and in this way I read U.. | James Baldwin | ||
| 7881cdf | It seems to be typical of life in America, where opportunities, real and fancied, are thicker than anywhere else on the globe, that the second generation has no time to talk to the first. | children family generations opportunities parents relationships | James Baldwin | |
| 62113b2 | One writes out of one thing only--one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art. The | James Baldwin | ||
| f4291f6 | I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. I | James Baldwin | ||
| 460fa44 | I know, in any case, that the most crucial time in my own development came when I was forced to recognize that I was a kind of a bastard of the West; when I followed the line of my past, I did not find myself in Europe but in Africa. And this meant that in some subtle way, in a really profound way, I brought to Shakespeare, Bach, Rembrandt, to the stones of Paris, to the cathedral at Chartres, and to the Empire State Building, a special att.. | James Baldwin | ||
| 4e4701f | Harlem, physically at least, has changed very little in my parents' lifetime or in mine. Now as then the buildings are old and in desperate need of repair, the streets are crowded and dirty, there are too many human beings per square block. Rents are 10 to 58 per cent higher than anywhere else in the city; food, expensive everywhere, is more expensive here and of an inferior quality; and now that the war is over and money is dwindling, clot.. | James Baldwin | ||
| 82c7240 | The terrible thing about being a Negro leader lies in the term itself. I do not mean merely the somewhat condescending differentiation the term implies, but the nicely refined torture a man can experience from having been created and defeated by the same circumstances. That is, Negro leaders have been created by the American scene, which thereafter works against them at every point; and the best that they can hope for is ultimately to work .. | James Baldwin | ||
| b69165f | Uncle Tom's Cabin--like its multitudinous, hard-boiled descendants--is a catalogue of violence. This is explained by the nature of Mrs. Stowe's subject matter, her laudable determination to flinch from nothing in presenting the complete picture; an explanation which falters only if we pause to ask whether or not her picture is indeed complete; and what constriction or failure of perception forced her to so depend on the description of bruta.. | James Baldwin | ||
| 5d971e3 | That this is not likely to happen is due to a great many reasons, most hidden and powerful among them the Negro's real relation to the white American. This relation prohibits, simply, anything as uncomplicated and satisfactory as pure hatred. In order really to hate white people, one has to blot so much out of the mind--and the heart--that this hatred itself becomes an exhausting and self-destructive pose. But this does not mean, on the oth.. | James Baldwin | ||
| bea93df | Finally, we are confronted with the psychology and tradition of the country; if the Negro vote is so easily bought and sold, it is because it has been treated with so little respect; since no Negro dares seriously assume that any politician is concerned with the fate of Negroes, or would do much about it if he had the power, the vote must be bartered for what it will get, for whatever short-term goals can be managed. These goals are mainly .. | James Baldwin | ||
| 76235e2 | Since Negroes have been in this country their one major, devastating gain was their Emancipation, an emancipation no one regards any more as having been dictated by humanitarian impulses. | James Baldwin | ||
| f372c94 | I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. I think all theories are suspect, that the finest principles may have to be modified, or may even be pulverized by the demands of life, and that one must find, therefore, one's own moral center and move through the world hoping that this center will guide one aright. | James Baldwin | ||
| b1e9688 | But this is not the story which Native Son tells, for we find here merely, repeated in anger, the story which we have told in pride. Nor, since the implications of this anger are evaded, are we ever confronted with the actual or potential significance of our pride; which is why we fall, with such a positive glow of recognition, upon Max's long and bitter summing up. | James Baldwin | ||
| 3dbb812 | It is savagely, if one may say so, ironical that the only proof the world--mankind--has ever had of White supremacy is in the Black face and voice: that face never scrutinized, that voice never heard. The eyes in that face prove the unforgivable and unimaginable horror of being a captive in the promised land, but also prove that trouble don't last always: and the voice, once filled with a rage and pain that corroborated the reality of the j.. | James Baldwin | ||
| f71d21d | Perhaps the best way to sum all this up is to say that the people I knew felt, mainly, a peculiar kind of relief when they knew that their boys were being shipped out of the south, to do battle overseas. It was, perhaps, like feeling that the most dangerous part of a dangerous journey had been passed and that now, even if death should come, it would come with honor and without the complicity of their countrymen. Such a death would be, in sh.. | James Baldwin | ||
| a3f15dc | It is not Bigger whom we fear, since his appearance among us makes our victory certain. It is the others, who smile, who go to church, who give no cause for complaint, whom we sometimes consider with amusement, with pity, even with affection--and in whose faces we sometimes surprise the merest arrogant hint of hatred, the faintest, withdrawn, speculative shadow of contempt--who make us uneasy; whom we cajole, threaten, flatter, fear; who to.. | James Baldwin | ||
| 2973a18 | But it is part of the business of the writer--as I see it--to examine attitudes, to go beneath the surface, to tap the source. | James Baldwin | ||
| e8d46f4 | It was the Lord who knew of the impossibility every parent in that room faced: how to prepare the child for the day when the child would be despised and how to create in the child--by what means?--a stronger antidote to this poison than one had found for oneself. The avenues, side streets, bars, billiard halls, hospitals, police stations, and even the playgrounds of Harlem--not to mention the houses of correction, the jails, and the morgue-.. | James Baldwin | ||
| 4392872 | 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 | ||
| f24ce67 | People, I have learned, have a way of taking root in one's still-developing mind without our knowing it, especially people, like [James] Baldwin, who live in the world of words. | influence james-baldwin words writers | Edward P. Jones | |
| e618094 | When he was dead I realized that I had hardly ever spoken to him. When he had been dead a long time I began to wish I had. It seems to be typical of life in America, where opportunities, real and fancied, are thicker than anywhere else on the globe, that the second generation has no time to talk to the first. | death james-baldwin | James Baldwin | |
| d5b0996 | Some moments in a life, and they needn't be very long or seem very important, can make up for so much in that life; can redeem, justify, that pain, that bewilderment, with which one lives, and invest one with the courage not only to endure it, but to profit from it; some moments teach one the price of the human connection: if one can live with one's own pain, then one respects the pain of others, and so, briefly, but transcendentally, we ca.. | James Baldwin | ||
| ebce23e | You are afraid that you have been here with me too long, and are not really white anymore. That's probably true, but you were never really white in the first place. Nobody is. Nobody has, even, ever wanted to be white, unless they are afraid of being black. But being black is nothing to be afraid of. I knew that before I met you, and I have learned it again, through you. Perhaps being white is not a conceivable condition, but a terrifying f.. | James Baldwin | ||
| aab747d | You come up to my sternum," Suri drawled back. "Anything below tit-height is a kid or a dwarf." | James Osiris Baldwin | ||
| b20157e | I was going be to flying around like some wacked-out Chinese martial arts movie hero by endgame, which was 200% okay with me. | James Osiris Baldwin |