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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 507616a | In the first place, as the homeless wanderers of the twentieth century prove, the question of nationality no longer necessarily involves the question of allegiance. Allegiance, after all, has to work two ways; and one can grow weary of an allegiance which is not reciprocal. | James Baldwin | ||
| 030c7c7 | Faulkner--among so many others!--is so plaintive concerning this "middle of the road" from which "extremist" elements of both races are driving him that it does not seem unfair to ask just what he has been doing there until now. Where is the evidence of the struggle he has been carrying on there on behalf of the Negro? Why, if he and his enlightened confreres in the South have been boring from within to destroy segregation, do they react wi.. | James Baldwin | ||
| d11d218 | I saw the Negro schools in Charlotte, saw, on street corners, several of their alumnae, and read about others who had been sentenced to the chain gang. This solved the mystery of just what made Negro parents send their children out to face mobs. White people do not understand this because they do not know, and do not want to know, that the alternative to this ordeal is nothing less than a lifelong ordeal. Those Negro parents who spend their.. | James Baldwin | ||
| b427614 | The Negroes in Harlem, who have no money, spend what they have on such gimcracks as they are sold. These include "wider" TV screens, more "faithful" hi-fi sets, more "powerful" cars, all of which, of course, are obsolete long before they are paid for. Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor; and if one is a member of a captive population, economically speaking, one's feet have simply been pl.. | James Baldwin | ||
| d02f50d | The people who have managed to get off this block have only got as far as a more respectable ghetto. This respectable ghetto does not even have the advantages of the disreputable one--friends, neighbors, a familiar church, and friendly tradesmen; and it is not, moreover, in the nature of any ghetto to remain respectable long. Every Sunday, people who have left the block take the lonely ride back, dragging their increasingly discontented chi.. | James Baldwin | ||
| e09a130 | And then: 'Here comes your baby. Sois sage. Sois chic.' He moved slightly away and began talking to the boy next to him. And here my baby came indeed, through all that sunlight, his face flushed and his hair flying, his eyes, unbelievably, like morning stars. | James Baldwin | ||
| 2f3a569 | This war between the Southern cities and states is of the utmost importance, not only for the South, but for the nation. The Southern states are still very largely governed by people whose political lives, insofar, at least, as they are able to conceive of life or politics, are dependent on the people in the rural regions. It might, indeed, be more honorable to try to guide these people out of their pain and ignorance instead of locking the.. | James Baldwin | ||
| 734ae49 | Such are the distances, in fact, that it isn't possible, in any practical terms, to draw the solar system to scale. Even if you added lots of fold-out pages to your textbooks or used a really long sheet of poster paper, you wouldn't come close. On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with the Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over 300 metres away and Pluto would be two and a half kilometres distant (and about.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 0781337 | Richard and I seemed really to be at the end of our rope, for he had done what he could for me, and it had not worked out, and now he was going away. It seemed to me that he was sailing into the most splendid of futures, for he was going, of all places! to France, and he had been invited there by the French government. But Richard did not seem, though he was jaunty, to be overjoyed. There was a striking sobriety in his face that day. He tal.. | James Baldwin | ||
| 4dee34c | 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. But even this is n.. | James Baldwin | ||
| 51adb9b | This illusion owes everything to the great American illusion that our state is a state to be envied by other people: we are powerful, and we are rich. But our power makes us uncomfortable and we handle it very ineptly. The principal effect of our material well-being has been to set the children's teeth on edge. If we ourselves were not so fond of this illusion, we might understand ourselves and other peoples better than we do, and be enable.. | James Baldwin | ||
| 9cacbf5 | Ah!" she said, "men may be at the mercy of women--I think men like that idea, it strokes the misogynist in them. But if a particular is ever at the mercy of a particular --why, he's somehow stopped being a man." -- | James Baldwin | ||
| d72950c | People love different people in different ways. | people relationship | James Baldwin | |
| 8b11ec1 | And as the boat-head wound along The willowy hills and fields among, They heard her singing her last song, The Lady of Shalott. Heard a carol, mournful, holy, Chanted loudly, chanted lowly, Till her blood was frozen slowly, And her eyes were darkened wholly, Turned to towered Camelot; For ere she reached upon the tide The first house by the water-side, Singing in her song she died, The Lady of Shalott. | James Baldwin | ||
| 7a96066 | Little breezes dusk 3 and shiver Through the wave that runs forever By the island in the river Flowing down to Camelot; Four gray walls, and four gray towers, Overlook a space of flowers, And the silent isle imbowers The Lady of Shalott. | James Baldwin | ||
| 4813def | For a woman," she said, "I think a man is always a stranger. And there's something awful about being at the mercy of a stranger." | James Baldwin | ||
| 3ee8e43 | THE SOLITARY REAPER. Behold her, single in the field, Yon solitary highland lass! Reaping and singing by herself; Stop here, or gently pass! Alone she cuts and binds the grain, And sings a melancholy strain; O listen! for the vale profound Is overflowing with the sound. No nightingale did ever chaunt More welcome notes to weary bands Of travellers in some shady haunt Among Arabian sands: A voice so thrilling ne'er was heard In spring-time f.. | James Baldwin | ||
| 87a2864 | a modern-day conservator of Monticello says that Woodmont Jefferson as an amateur architect rather than a professional was that he made things more complicated than they needed to be for any practical purpose. | overcompensation professionalism | Bill Bryson | |
| a4cbe9a | A full moon rose in the pale evening sky and glowed with a rich white inner light that brought to mind, but perfectly, the creamy inside of an Oreo cookie. (Eventually on the trail everything reminds you of food.) | Bill Bryson | ||
| c59d057 | ANY REAL CHANGE IMPLIES THE breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment, unable to see and not daring to imagine what the future will now bring forth, one clings to what one knew, or thought one knew; to what one possessed or dreamed that one possessed. Yet, it is only when a man is able, without bitterness or self-pity, to surrender a dream he has long .. | James Baldwin | ||
| 1107869 | Negroes know how little most white people are prepared to implement their words with deeds, how little, when the chips are down, they are prepared to risk. And this long history of moral evasion has had an unhealthy effect on the total life of the country, and has eroded whatever respect Negroes may once have felt for white people. | James Baldwin | ||
| 399363a | In Africa, he said, there was none whatever. Africans do not, in fact, believe that Christianity is any longer real for Europeans, due to the immense scaffolding with which they have covered it, and the fact that this religion has no effect whatever on their conduct. | James Baldwin | ||
| 44ce3d2 | I do not know what I would do if you left me." For the first time I felt the suggestion of a threat in his voice--or I put it there. "I have been alone so long--I do not think I would be able to live if I had to be alone again." | giovanni-s-room james-baldwin relationship romantic-relationship suicidal threat | James Baldwin | |
| fd09495 | People are continually pointing out to me the wretchedness of white people in order to console me for the wretchedness of blacks. But an itemized account of the American failure does not console me and it should not console anyone else. | James Baldwin | ||
| 6bda1ef | And: the only way anything ever gets done is when you make up your mind to do it. | James Baldwin | ||
| 6aa9b8a | And the others, who have avoided all of these deaths, get up in the morning and go downtown to meet "the man." They work in the white man's world all day and come home in the evening to this fetid block. They struggle to instill in their children some private sense of honor or dignity which will help the child to survive. This means, of course, that they must struggle, stolidly, incessantly, to keep this sense alive in themselves, in spite .. | James Baldwin | ||
| a42abda | I loved her as much as ever and I still did not know how much that was. | confused giovanni-s-room james-baldwin love relationship romantic-relationship uncertain | James Baldwin | |
| 4fc9c50 | There were pauses in the music for the rushing, calling, halting piano. Everything would stop except the climbing of the soloist; he would reach a height and everything would join him, the violins first and then the horns; and then the deep blue bass and the flute and the bitter trampling drums; beating, beating and mounting together and stopping with a crash like daybreak. When I first heard the Messiah I was alone; my blood bubbled like f.. | James Baldwin | ||
| 0cb4bf4 | Oi anthropoi pou thumountai trelainontai apo ton pono,ton pono na anabionoun aionios ton thanato tes athootetas tous.Oi anthropoi pou xekhnoun pathainoun mia allou eidous trela,ten trela tes arneses tou ponou kai tou misous tes athootetas. | James Baldwin | ||
| 60ce1c5 | But, in the end, it is the threat of universal extinction hanging over all the world today that changes, totally and forever, the nature of reality and brings into devastating question the true meaning of man's history. We human beings now have the power to exterminate ourselves; this seems to be the entire sum of our achievement. | James Baldwin | ||
| d91f19d | The energy that was buried with the rise of the Christian nations must come back into the world; nothing can prevent it. Many of us, I think, both long to see this happen and are terrified of it, for though this transformation contains the hope of liberation, it also imposes a necessity for great change. But in order to deal with the untapped and dormant force of the previously subjugated, in order to survive as a human, moving, moral weigh.. | James Baldwin | ||
| ea7b1d2 | The aim of the dreamer, after all, is merely to go on dreaming and not be molested by the world. His dreams are his protection against the world. But the aims of life are antithetical to those of the dreamer, and the teeth of the world are sharp. | James Baldwin | ||
| 2a880b7 | A mob is not autonomous: it executes the real will of the people who rule the State. The slaughter in Birmingham, Alabama, for example, was not merely the action of a mob. | mob-mentality race state usa | James Baldwin | |
| 42d8db5 | And these nights were being acted out under a foreign sky, with no one to watch, no penalties attached--it was this last fact which was our undoing for nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom. I suppose this was why I asked her to marry me: to give myself something to be moored to. Perhaps this was why, in Spain, she decided that she wanted to marry me. But people can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers .. | James Baldwin | ||
| e311bb8 | He looked like a baby, his mouth half open, his cheek flused, his curly hair darkening the pillow and half hiding his damp round forehead and his long eyelashes glinting slightly in the summer sun. We were both naked and the sheet we had used as a cover was tangled around our feet. Joey's body was brown, was sweaty, the most beautiful creation I had ever seen til then. I would have touched him to wake him up but something stopped me. I was .. | James Baldwin | ||
| 983ec8f | It was Southern, therefore, to put it brutally, because of the history of America--the United States of America: and small black boys and girls were now paying for this holocaust. They were attempting to go to school. They were attempting to get an education, in a country in which education is a synonym for indoctrination, if you are white, and subjugation, if you are black. It was rather as though small Jewish boys and girls, in Hitler's G.. | James Baldwin | ||
| 3e1163c | 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 | ||
| c6cb532 | People, even if they are so thoughtless as to be born black, do not come into this world merely to provide mink coats and diamonds for chattering, trivial, pale matrons, or genocidal opportunities for their unsexed, unloved, and, finally, despicable men--oh, pioneers! There will be bloody holding actions all over the world, for years to come: but the Western party is over, and the white man's sun has set. Period. | imperialism no-name-in-the-street post-imperialism | James Baldwin | |
| 64aa40e | I think that the past is all that makes the present coherent, and further, that the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly. | James Baldwin | ||
| e61abf7 | Maybe it's because you see people differently than you saw them before your trouble started. Maybe you wonder about them more, but in a different way, and this makes them very strange to you. Maybe you get scared and numb, because you don't know if you can depend on people for anything, anymore. | trouble | James Baldwin | |
| 138292b | Vile as I am," states one of the characters in Dostoevski's The Idiot, "I don't believe in the wagons that bring bread to humanity. For the wagons that bring bread to humanity, without any moral basis for conduct, may coldly exclude a considerable part of humanity from enjoying what is brought; so it has been already." | James Baldwin | ||
| 14e4be7 | On this particular night, we were free and we had decided to treat ourselves to a really fancy, friendly dinner. There we were, at the table, all dressed up, and we'd ordered everything, and we were having a very nice time with each other. The headwaiter came, and said there was a phone call for me, and Gloria rose to take it. She was very strange when she came back--she didn't say anything, and I began to be afraid to ask her anything. The.. | James Baldwin | ||
| 2ee20d6 | It is really quite impossible to be affirmative about anything which one refuses to question; one is doomed to remain inarticulate about about anything which one hasn't, by an act of the imagination, made one's own. | questions | James Baldwin | |
| b025b98 | NED: I belong to a culture that includes Proust, Henry James, Tchaikovsky, Cole Porter, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Alexander the Great, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Christopher Marlowe, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Tennessee Williams, Byron, E. M. Forster, Lorca, Auden, Francis Bacon, James Baldwin, Harry Stack Sullivan, john Maynard Keynes, Dag Hammarskjold . . . These are not invisible men. | Larry Kramer |