1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2208
3346
3522
5443
5619
5839
5840
5841
5842
5843
6757
7581
8098
8422
8625
8752
8832
8882
8913
8932
8945
8953
8957
8960
8962
8963
8964
8965
▲
▼
| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| d0cd5ec | I did not intend to allow the white people of this country to tell me who I was, and limit me that way, and polish me off that way. And yet, of course, at the same time, I being spat on and defined and described and limited, and could have been polished off with no effort whatever. Every Negro boy - in my situation during those years, at least - who reaches this point realizes, at once, profoundly, because he wants to live, that he stands.. | James Baldwin | ||
| b860e14 | large part of her simplicity consisted in determining not to want what she could not have with ease. So | James Baldwin | ||
| 20ddc69 | The fear that I heard in my father's voice, for example, when he realized that I really 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 fear that the child, in challenging the white world's assumptions, was putting himself in the path of destruction. | James Baldwin | ||
| 9c2592c | White people were, and are, astounded by the holocaust in Germany. They did not know that they could act that way. But I very much doubt whether black people were astounded - at least, in the same way. For my part, the fate of the Jews, and the world's indifference to it, frightened me very much. i could not but feel, in those sorrowful years, that this human indifference, concerning which I knew so much already, would be my portion on the .. | James Baldwin | ||
| 83eb598 | In a society that is entirely hostile, and, by its nature, seems determined to cut you down - that has cut down so many in the past and cuts down so many every day - it begins to be almost impossible to distinguish a real from a fancied injury. One can very quickly cease to attempt this distinction, and, what is worse, one usually ceases to attempt it without realizing that one has done so. | James Baldwin | ||
| adc145b | In the eeriest way possible, I suddenly had a glimpse of what white people must go through at a dinner table when they are trying to prove that Negroes are not subhuman. I had almost said, after all, "Well, take my friend Mary," and very nearly descended to a catalogue of those virtues that gave Mary the right to be alive. And in what hope? That Elijah and the others would nod their heads solemnly and say, at least, "Well, all right - but.. | James Baldwin | ||
| 17f951b | It is the responsibility of free men to trust and to celebrate what is constant--birth, struggle, and death are constant, and so is love, though we may not always think so--and to apprehend the nature of change, to be able and willing to change. I speak of change not on the surface but in the depths--change in the sense of renewal. But renewal becomes impossible if one supposes things to be constant that are not--safety, for example, or mon.. | James Baldwin | ||
| 390209d | To dream and dream, like yonder amber light Which will not leave the myrrh-bush on the | James Baldwin | ||
| f760283 | She thought of herself as his strength; in a world of shadows, the indisputable reality to which he could always repair. And, again, for all that had come, she could not regret this. She had tried, but she had never been and was not now, even tonight, truly sorry. Where, then, was her repentance? And how could God hear her cry? | James Baldwin | ||
| 1e0436a | dared to accept this opportunity, or even to conceive of it as an opportunity. White Americans have thought of it as their shame, and have envied those more civilized and elegant European nations that were untroubled by the presence of black men on their shores. This is because white Americans have supposed "Europe" and "civilization" to be synonyms--which they are not--and have been distrustful of other standards and other sources of vital.. | James Baldwin | ||
| 5c21f4f | Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise. | James Baldwin | ||
| d540c9c | That summer, in any case, all the fears with which I had grown up, and which were now a part of me and controlled my vision of the world, rose up like a wall between the world and me, and drove me into the church. | race-and-racism-in-america religion | James Baldwin | |
| 6bfd7c7 | If dirty words frighten you," said Giovanni, "I really do not know how you have managed to live so long. People are full of dirty words. The only time they do not use them, most people I mean, is when they are describing something dirty." | James Baldwin | ||
| b4fb39d | But I had been in the pulpit too long and I had seen too many monstrous things. I don't refer merely to the glaring fact that the minister eventually acquires houses and Cadillacs while the faithful continue to scrub floors and drop their dimes and quarters and dollars into the plate. I really mean that there was no love in the church. It was a mask for hatred and self-hatred and despair. The transfiguring power of the Holy Ghost ended when.. | James Baldwin | ||
| a4689a2 | The first time I saw Reverend Shuttlesworth, for example, he came strolling across the parking lot of the motel where I was staying, his hat perched precariously between the back of his skull and the nape of his neck, alone. It was late at night, and Shuttlesworth was a marked man in Birmingham. He came up into my room, and, while we talked, he kept walking back and forth to the window. I finally realized that he was keeping an eye on his c.. | James Baldwin | ||
| b8ff7e2 | I have known both of you all your lives, have carried your Daddy in my arms and on my shoulders, kissed and spanked him and watched him learn to walk. I don't know if you've known anybody from that far back; if you've loved anybody that long, first as an infant, then as a child, then as a man, you gain a strange perspective on time and human pain and effort. Other people cannot see what I see whenever I look into your father's face, for beh.. | inspirational parenting relationships | James Baldwin | |
| e83d8ff | The fact that their [the flower children's] uniforms and their jargons precisely represented the distances they had yet to cover before arriving at that maturity which makes love possible--or no longer possible--could not be considered their fault. They had been born into a society in which nothing was harder to achieve, in which perhaps nothing was more scorned and feared than the idea of the soul's maturity. | imperialism james-baldwin no-name-in-the-street post-imperialism | James Baldwin | |
| 2a41e34 | In benighted, incompetent Africa, I had never encountered an orphan: the American streets resembled nothing so much as one vast, howling, unprecedented orphanage. It has been vivid to me for many years that what we call a race problem here is not a race problem at all: to keep calling it that is a way of avoiding the problem. The problem is rooted in the question of how one treats one's flesh and blood, especially one's children. | imperialism james-baldwin no-name-in-the-street post-imperialism | James Baldwin | |
| 3e7d4b4 | 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. Jacques | James Baldwin | ||
| a772d39 | But people can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life. I | James Baldwin | ||
| 2dc5fcc | How can one, however, dream of power in any other terms than in the symbols of power? | James Baldwin | ||
| 0f6fdef | Ain't no such thing as a little fault or a big fault. Satan get his foot in the door, he ain't going to rest till he's in the room. You is in the Word or you ain't--ain't no halfway with God. | religion-christianity spirituality | James Baldwin | |
| bce7ef2 | You might even wait and do your cruising as a retired person clutching a fistful of platinum credit cards on a finely fitted boat filled with expensive gadgets needed to maintain your increased demands for comfort and security. But by that time you are somewhat lacking in the robust health and enthusiasm to fully engage in your long-postponed adventure. If I chose to sail as a young adventurer, poorly equipped in the material sense, I make .. | James Baldwin | ||
| fe00be1 | As all sailors ultimately learn, it is easier to prepare a boat for sea than to clear the decks of your life for a voyage into unknown waters. | James Baldwin | ||
| 8236367 | He must be "good" not only in order to please his parents and not only to avoid being punished by them; behind their authority stands another, nameless and impersonal, infinitely harder to please, and bottomlessly cruel. And this filters into the child's consciousness through his parents' tone of voice as he is being exhorted, punished, or loved; in the sudden, uncontrollable note of fear heard in his mother's or his father's voice when he .. | James Baldwin | ||
| e3d65b4 | JAMES BALDWIN (1924-1987) American writer Notes of a Native Son (1955) A devotion to humanity ... is too easily equated with a devotion to a Cause, and Causes, as we know, are notoriously blood-thirsty. | George Seldes | ||
| 88fe9b2 | The moon doth with delight Look round her when the heavens are bare; Waters on a starry night Are beautiful and fair; | James Baldwin | ||
| b53cf4c | At night I studied the stars, memorizing the sky charts by penlight and then locating them in the real world planetarium reeling overhead. Where one man sees emptiness, another man sees his world bursting with fullness. No | James Baldwin | ||
| f578703 | short poem by Wordsworth, entitled "My Heart leaps up": "My heart leaps up when I behold A rainbow in the sky. So was it when my life began; So is it now I am a man; So be it when I shall grow old," | James Baldwin | ||
| 880763a | The sea, especially in its moments of fury, demands first your attention, then your endurance, and finally your patience and acceptance. If you lack this capacity, the sea will soon find you out and make it known to you that the shore is where you should make your home. Each | James Baldwin | ||
| 6e90fc3 | The beast which Giovanni had awakened in me would never go to sleep again; but one day I would not be with Giovanni any more. And would I then, like all the others, find myself turning and following all kinds of boys down God knows what dark avenues, into what dark places? With this fearful intimation there opened in me hatred for Giovanni which was as powerful as my love and which was nourished by the same roots. | James Baldwin | ||
| 2a2e0c0 | Whoever debases others is debasing himself. That | James Baldwin | ||
| 6ee0740 | Ashore, the palms gently bowed before the wind, mixing the rustling of fronds with the murmur of surf in a captivating voice of mid-ocean solitude. With fully restored mind and body, I sailed away the next morning on a light wind, headed for a distant island of a million people. | James Baldwin | ||
| 8024fc9 | Solitude is the home of the strong; silence, their prayer. - | James Baldwin | ||
| 42537dd | he was defeated long before he died because, at the bottom of his heart, he really believed what white people said about him. | James Baldwin | ||
| 9095300 | James Baldwin's "My Dungeon Shook--Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of Emancipation," published in The Fire Next Time in 1963 (the same year Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., penned another seminal and brilliant epistolary essay, "Letter from Birmingham" | Carolina De Robertis | ||
| 36dfd7f | There are many things that seem impossible only so long as one does not attempt them. | André Gide | ||
| d879f30 | They tell you to do your thing but they don't mean it. They don't want you to do your own thing, not unless it happens to be their thing, too. It's a laugh, Goober, a fake. Don't disturb the universe, Goober, no matter what the posters say. | Robert Cormier | ||
| 7109c11 | Archie believed in always doing the smart thing. Not the thing you ached to do, not the impulsive act, but the thing that would pay off later. | Robert Cormier | ||
| c182ad8 | She was sleek and stylish, every hair in place, slim and elegant. When preparing meals in the kitchen or baking a cake, she never appeared disheveled, never a dab of flour on her face. Even her aprons were stylish, not merely to protect her from spills or splashes. They matched whatever she was wearing. | Robert Cormier | ||
| 31ff078 | Was this all there was to life, after all? You finished school, found an occupation, got married, became a father, watched your wife die, and then lived through days and nights that seemed to have no sunrises, no dawns and no dusks, nothing but a gray drabness. | Robert Cormier | ||
| f94f384 |
Vnizu plakatika stoiala nadpis': Osmelius' li ia potrevozhit' vselennuiu? Slova Eliota -- avtora < |
Robert Cormier | ||
| 02181d9 | He was afraid that his body would come loose, all his bones spilling out like a building collapsing, like a picket fence clattering apart. | Robert Cormier | ||
| 8117126 | We just might make a quarterback out of you yet, you skinny little son of a bitch. | Robert Cormier |