JAMES BALDWIN QUOTES IV

American novelist (1960- )


Notice: Undefined variable: id in /hermes/walnacweb03/walnacweb03ak/b2149/pow.notablequote/htdocs/b/includes/quoter.php on line 25

How can one respect, let alone adopt, the values of a people who do not, on any level whatever, live the way they say they do, or the way they say they should?

JAMES BALDWIN
Notice: Undefined variable: id in /hermes/walnacweb03/walnacweb03ak/b2149/pow.notablequote/htdocs/b/includes/quoter.php on line 35

The Fire Next Time


Notice: Undefined variable: id in /hermes/walnacweb03/walnacweb03ak/b2149/pow.notablequote/htdocs/b/includes/quoter.php on line 61

Tags: respect


The great question that faced him this morning was whether or not he had ever, really, been present at his life. For if he had ever been present, then he was present still, and his world would open up before him.

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country

Tags: life


Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.

JAMES BALDWIN

Esquire, April 1960

Tags: poverty


I guess it can’t be too often that two people can laugh and make love, too, make love because they are laughing, laugh because they’re making love. The love and the laughter come from the same place: but not many people go there.

JAMES BALDWIN

If Beale Street Could Talk

Tags: love


Love was a country he knew nothing about.

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country


Yet, if the American Negro has arrived at his identity by virtue of the absoluteness of his estrangement from his past, American white men still nourish the illusion that there is some means of recovering the European innocence, of returning to a state in which black men do not exist. This is one of the greatest errors Americans can make. The identity they fought so hard to protect has, by virtue of that battle, undergone a change: Americans are as unlike any other white people in the world as it is possible to be.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: identity


His dangerous, overwhelming lust for life had failed to involve him in anything deeper than perhaps half a dozen extremely casual acquaintanceships in about as many bars.

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country

Tags: life


I remember what it was ... to be young, very young. When everything, touching and tasting--everything--was so new, and even suffering was wonderful because it was so complete.

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country

Tags: suffering


And I was alone, had been for a while, and might be for a while, but it no longer frightened me the way it had. I was discovering something terrifyingly simple: there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. I was discovering this in the way, I suppose, that everybody does, but having tried, endlessly, to do something about it.

JAMES BALDWIN

Just Above My Head


The betrayal of a belief is not the same thing as ceasing to believe. If this were not so there would be no moral standards in the world at all.

JAMES BALDWIN

The Price of the Ticket

Tags: belief


One of the most American of attributes: the inability to believe that time is real. It is this inability which makes them so romantic about the nature of society, and it is this inability which has led them into a total confusion about the nature of experience.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: nature


Something like lust, something like hatred, seems to hover in the air along the country roads, shifting like mist or steam, but always there, gripping the city streets like fog, making every corner a dangerous corner.

JAMES BALDWIN

Just Above My Head

Tags: lust


One of the most terrible, most mysterious things about a life is that a warning can be heeded only in retrospect: too late.

JAMES BALDWIN

If Beale Street Could Talk

Tags: life


The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.

JAMES BALDWIN

The Fire Next Time

Tags: faith


At the rate things are going here, all of Africa will be free before we can get a lousy cup of coffee.

JAMES BALDWIN

"A Negro Assays on the Negro Mood", New York Times, March 12, 1961

Tags: coffee


Nothing tamed or broke her, nothing touched her, neither kindness, nor scorn, nor hatred, nor love. She had never thought of prayer. It was unimaginable that she would ever bend her knees and come crawling along a dusty floor to anybody’s altar.

JAMES BALDWIN

Go Tell It on the Mountain

Tags: kindness


Bigger dreams of some black man who will weld all blacks together into a mighty fist.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: dreams


People don't have any mercy. They tear you limb from limb, in the name of love. Then, when you're dead, when they've killed you by what they made you go through, they say you didn't have any character. They weep big, bitter tears - not for you. For themselves, because they've lost their toy.

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country

Tags: character


We all commit our crimes. The thing is to not lie about them -- to try to understand what you have done, why you have done it. That way, you can begin to forgive yourself. That's very important. If you don't forgive yourself you'll never be able to forgive anybody else and you'll go on committing the same crimes forever.

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country


I can conceive of no Negro native to this country who has not, by the age of puberty, been irreparably scarred by the conditions of his life.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: age