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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 8c9bac6 | I stared at absurd Paris, which was as cluttered now, under the scalding sun, as the landscape of my heart. | giovanni-s-room heart james-baldwin paris | James Baldwin | |
| f2f61f4 | How wonderful," I said flatly. The sarge grinned, her eyes glittering. "Every day's wonderful here with me. Dismissed!" | James Osiris Baldwin | ||
| 07d2d8e | One would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first idea was 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 mus.. | James Baldwin | ||
| 039bf8e | To smash something is the ghetto's chronic need. Most of the time it is the members of the ghetto who smash each other, and themselves. But as long as the ghetto walls are standing there will always come a moment when these outlets do not work. | anger blacks destruction ghettos poverty rebellion riots uprisings | James Baldwin | |
| cae0410 | Americans are as unlike any other white people in the world as it is possible to be. I do not think, for example, that it is too much to suggest that the American vision of the world--which allows so little reality, generally speaking, for any of the darker forces in human life, which tends until today to paint moral issues in glaring black and white--owes a great deal to the battle waged by Americans to maintain between themselves and blac.. | James Baldwin | ||
| a313798 | Let us say, then, that truth, as used here, is meant to imply a devotion to the human being, his freedom and fulfillment; freedom which cannot be legislated, fulfillment which cannot be charted. | James Baldwin | ||
| 4befbd1 | I know what I'm asking is impossible. But in our time, as in every time, the impossible is the least that one can demand-and one is, after all, emboldened by the spectacle of human history in general, and the American Negro history in particular, for it testifies to nothing less than the perpetual achievement of the impossible. | James Baldwin | ||
| 7180284 | 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. | society | James Baldwin | |
| f36c247 | This helplessness and this gnawing uneasiness does something, at length, to even the toughest mind. 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, i.. | James Baldwin | ||
| 571d2cb | I know a lot of people done took their own lives and they're walking up and down the streets today and some of them is preaching the gospel and some is sitting in the seats of the mighty. Now, you remember that. If the world wasn't so full of dead folks maybe those of us that's trying to live wouldn't have to suffer so bad. | James Baldwin | ||
| de53233 | He is not here for anything he has done. He has always known that, but now he knows it with a difference. At meals, in the showers, up and down the stairs, in the evening, just before everyone is locked in again, he looks at the others, he listens: what have they done? Not much. To do much is to have the power to place these people where they are, and keep them where they are. These captive men are the hidden price for a hidden lie: the rig.. | James Baldwin | ||
| 8f99330 | J'imagine que l'une des raisons pour lesquelles les gens s'accrochent de maniere si tenace a leurs haines, c'est qu'ils sentent bien que, une fois la haine disparue, ils se retrouveront confrontes a la douleur". James Baldwin, "Notes of a Native Son" [1955] (p.32)" | Didier Eribon | ||
| 82aaff2 | He wished he could rescue her, that it was within his power to rescue her and make her life less hard. But it was only love which could accomplish the miracle of making a life bearable -- only love, and love itself mostly failed; and he had never loved her. He had used her to find out something about himself. And even this was not true. He had used her in the hope of avoiding a confrontation with himself which he had, nevertheless, and with.. | James Baldwin | ||
| 69752e5 | Our dehumanization of the Negro then is indivisible from our dehumanization of ourselves: the loss of our own identity is the price we pay for our annulment of his. | James Baldwin | ||
| 3900657 | I really mean that there was no love in the church. It was a mask for hatred and self-hatred and despair. | James Baldwin | ||
| b48c1ee | White Americans find it as difficult as white people elsewhere do to divest themselves of the notion that they are in possession of some intrinsic value that black people need, or want. And this assumption--which, for example, makes the solution to the Negro problem depend on the speed with which Negroes accept and adopt white standards--is revealed in all kinds of striking ways, from Bobby Kennedy's assurance that a Negro can become Presid.. | James Baldwin | ||
| a15d85d | The paradox of education is precisely this--that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. JAMES A. BALDWIN | Patrisse Khan-Cullors | ||
| 681017f | The question of identity is a question involving the most profound panic--a terror as primary as the nightmare of the mortal fall. | identity | James Baldwin | |
| 3de509d | He was suggesting that all Negroes were held in a state of supreme tension between the difficult, dangerous relationship in which they stood to the white world and the relationship, not a whit less painful or dangerous, in which they stood to each other. | James Baldwin | ||
| bb5b5e0 | The projects are hideous, of course, there being a law, apparently respected throughout the world, that popular housing shall be as cheerless as a prison. They are lumped all over Harlem, colorless, bleak, high, and revolting. The wide windows look out on Harlem's invincible and indescribable squalor: the Park Avenue railroad tracks, around which, about forty years ago, the present dark community began; the unrehabilitated houses, bowed dow.. | James Baldwin | ||
| 3a18996 | What it comes to, finally, is that the nation has spent a large part of its time and energy looking away from one of the principal facts of its life. This failure to look reality in the face diminishes a nation as it diminishes a person, and it can only be described as unmanly. And in exactly the same way that the South imagines that it "knows" the Negro, the North imagines that it has set him free. Both camps are deluded. Human freedom is .. | James Baldwin | ||
| 5d42fe3 | The people in Harlem know they are living there because white people do not think they are good enough to live anywhere else. No amount of "improvement" can sweeten this fact. Whatever money is now being earmarked to improve this, or any other ghetto, might as well be burnt. A ghetto can be improved in one way only: out of existence." | James Baldwin | ||
| cba552a | Negroes want to be treated like men: a perfectly straightforward statement, containing only seven words. People who have mastered Kant, Hegel, Shakespeare, Marx, Freud, and the Bible find this statement utterly impenetrable. The idea seems to threaten profound, barely conscious assumptions. A kind of panic paralyzes their features, as though they found themselves trapped on the edge of a steep place. | James Baldwin | ||
| 47c92bd | I do not think, if one is a writer, that one escapes it by trying to become something else. One does not become something else: one becomes nothing. And what is crucial here is that the writer, however unwillingly, always, somewhere, knows this. There is no structure he can build strong enough to keep out this self-knowledge. What has happened, however, time and time again, is that the fantasy structure the writer builds in order to escape .. | James Baldwin | ||
| 140e22e | Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace--not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth." | James Baldwin | ||
| ef90c95 | but what men imagine they are doing and what they are doing in fact are rarely the same thing. | James Baldwin | ||
| e6f5043 | quoted Djuna Barnes: "Too great a sense of identity makes a man feel he can do no wrong. And too little does the same." | James Baldwin | ||
| 13c9158 | He was suggesting that all Negroes were held in a state of supreme tension between the difficult, dangerous relationship in which they stood to the white world and the relationship, not a whit less painful or dangerous, in which they stood to each other. He was suggesting that in the acceptance of this duality lay their strength, that in this, precisely, lay their means of defining and controlling the world in which they lived. | James Baldwin | ||
| 1f35f1b | All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up. All of it, the literal and the fanciful. | James Baldwin | ||
| f34d278 | One day, Richard would turn to me, with the light of sudden understanding on his face, and say, "Oh, that's what you mean." And then, so ran the dream, a great and invaluable dialogue would have begun. And the great value of this dialogue would have been not only in its power to instruct all of you, and the ages. Its great value would have been in its power to instruct me, its power to instruct Richard: for it would have been nothing less t.. | James Baldwin | ||
| 2e608e4 | One day, Richard would turn to me, with the light of sudden understanding on his face, and say, "Oh, that's what you mean." And then, so ran the dream, a great and invaluable dialogue would have begun. And the great value of this dialogue would have been not only in its power to instruct all of you, and the ages. Its great value would have been in its power to instruct me, its power to instruct Richard: for it would have been nothing less t.. | James Baldwin | ||
| 3b187d7 | Negroes know about each other what can here be called family secrets, and this means that one Negro, if he wishes, can "knock" the other's "hustle"--can give his game away. It is still not possible to overstate the price a Negro pays to climb out of obscurity--for it is a particular price, involved with being a Negro; and the great wounds, gouges, amputations, losses, scars, endured in such a journey cannot be calculated." | James Baldwin | ||
| 9a883dc | An identity is questioned only when it is menaced...Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self... | James Baldwin | ||
| 2c90dde | The world had prepared no place for you, and if the world had its way, no place would ever exist. Now, this is true for everyone, but, in the case of a Negro, this truth is absolutely naked: if he deludes himself about it, he will die. This is not the way this truth presents itself to white men, who believe the world is theirs and who, albeit unconsciously, expect the world to help them in the achievement of their identity. | James Baldwin | ||
| a8e1ecd | The situation, therefore, in the colonial countries, is tragic," Cesaire continued. "Wherever colonization is a fact the indigenous culture begins to rot. And, among these ruins, something begins to be born which is not a culture but a kind of subculture, a subculture which is condemned to exist on the margin allowed it by European culture. This then becomes the province of a few men, the elite, who find themselves placed in the most artifi.. | James Baldwin | ||
| ae2e1a7 | In the culture to be born there will no doubt be old and new elements. How these elements will be mixed is not a question to which any individual can respond. The response must be given by the community. But we can say this: that the response will be given, and not verbally, but in tangible facts, and by action. | James Baldwin | ||
| e77de61 | An American Negro, however deep his sympathies, or however bright his rage, ceases to be simply a black man when he faces a black man from Africa. When I say simply a black man, I do not mean that being a black man is simple, anywhere. But I am suggesting that one of the prices an American Negro pays--or can pay--for what is called his "acceptance" is a profound, almost ineradicable self-hatred. This corrupts every aspect of his living, he .. | James Baldwin | ||
| e307b43 | This lack of what may roughly be called social paranoia causes the American writer in Europe to feel--almost certainly for the first time in his life--that he can reach out to everyone, that he is accessible to everyone and open to everything. This is an extraordinary feeling. He feels, so to speak, his own weight, his own value. | James Baldwin | ||
| dd5341e | All cultures have, furthermore, an economic, social, and political base, and no culture can continue to live if its political destiny is not in its own hands. "Any political and social regime which destroys the self-determination of a people also destroys the creative power of that people." When this has happened the culture of that people has been destroyed. And it is simply not true that the colonizers bring to the colonized a new culture.. | James Baldwin | ||
| 499fdd8 | Thursday's great event was Aime Cesaire's speech in the afternoon, dealing with the relation between colonization and culture. | James Baldwin | ||
| 628b3cd | I was, in short, but one generation removed from the South, which was now undergoing a new convulsion over whether black children had the same rights, or capacities, for education as did the children of white people. This is a criminally frivolous dispute, absolutely unworthy of this nation; and it is being carried on, in complete bad faith, by completely uneducated people. (We do not trust educated people and rarely, alas, produce them, fo.. | James Baldwin | ||
| 1274ff4 | The world tends to trap and immobilize you in the role you play; and it is not always easy--in fact, it is always extremely hard--to maintain a kind of watchful, mocking distance between oneself as one appears to be and oneself as one actually is. | James Baldwin | ||
| 7fa7c8f | If you have been watching television lately, I think this is unendurably clear in the faces of those screaming people in the South, who are quite incapable of telling you what it is they are afraid of. They do not really know what it is they are afraid of, but they know they are afraid of something, and they are so frightened that they are nearly out of their minds. And this same fear obtains on one level or another, to varying degrees, thr.. | James Baldwin | ||
| cd48503 | On the contrary, we have a very deep-seated distrust of real intellectual effort (probably because we suspect that it will destroy, as I hope it does, that myth of America to which we cling so desperately). | James Baldwin |