JAMES BALDWIN QUOTES III

American novelist (1960- )

In Harlem, Negro policemen are feared more than whites, for they have more to prove and fewer ways to prove it.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son


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.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: America


I watch the men in the hospital, in the streets--some of these men are pretty awful people, they really are slimy sewer scum, do anything to pay down on the car, to meet the damn car payments--they don't care about women, or men, or nobody. It just seems so hopeless.

JAMES BALDWIN

Just Above My Head

Tags: Men


Their singing caused him to believe in the presence of the Lord; indeed, it was no longer a question of belief, because they made that presence real.

JAMES BALDWIN

Go Tell It on the Mountain

Tags: belief


Heavenly witnesses are a tricky lot, to be used by whoever is closest to Heaven at the time. And legend and theology, which are designed to sanctify our fears, crimes, and aspirations, also reveal them for what they are.

JAMES BALDWIN

The Fire Next Time

Tags: Heaven


Whenever we encounter him in the flesh, our faith is made perfect and his necessary and bloody end is executed with a mystical ferocity of joy.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: faith


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


And then they walked through the town, in which not even a cat seemed to be moving; and everywhere they walked, the cathedral was watching them.

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country


The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through.

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country


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


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


Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.

JAMES BALDWIN

Giovanni's Room


Love brought you here. If you trusted love this far, don't panic now.

JAMES BALDWIN

If Beale Street Could Talk

Tags: love


The trouble with a secret life is that it is very frequently a secret from the person who lives it and not at all a secret for the people he encounters. He encounters, because he must encounter, those people who see his secrecy before they see anything else, and who drag these secrets out of him; sometimes with the intention of using them against him, sometimes with more benevolent intent; but, whatever the intent, the moment is awful and the accumulating revelation is an unspeakable anguish.

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country

Tags: secret


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

The Fire Next Time

Tags: respect


Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty.

JAMES BALDWIN

Blues for Mister Charlie

Tags: cruelty


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


The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately.

JAMES BALDWIN

The Devil Finds Work

Tags: civilization


Whenever he was uncomfortable -- which was often -- his arms and legs seemed to stretch to monstrous proportions and he handled them with bewildered loathing, as though he had been afflicted with them.

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country


You took the best, so why not take the rest?

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country