JAMES BALDWIN QUOTES IV

American novelist (1960- )

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

JAMES BALDWIN

If Beale Street Could Talk

Tags: love


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


You begin to see that you yourself, innocent, upright you, have contributed and do contribute to the misery of the world. Which will never end because we’re what we are.

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country

Tags: misery


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 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


All over Harlem, Negro boys and girls are growing into stunted maturity, trying desperately to find a place to stand; and the wonder is not that so many are ruined but that so many survive.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: maturity


You don't realize that you're intelligent until it gets you into trouble.

JAMES BALDWIN

interview with Julius Lester, New York Times, May 27, 1984

Tags: intelligence


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


Those kids aren't dumb. But the people who run these schools want to make sure they don't get smart: they are really teaching the kids to be slaves.

JAMES BALDWIN

If Beale Street Could Talk

Tags: kids


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


I conceive of God, in fact, as a means of liberation and not a means to control others.

JAMES BALDWIN

address delivered at Kalamazoo College, February 1960

Tags: God


Words like "freedom," "justice," "democracy" are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous and, above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply.

JAMES BALDWIN

The Nation, July 7, 1956

Tags: respect


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

JAMES BALDWIN

The Devil Finds Work

Tags: civilization


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


You carry this pain around inside all day and all night long. No way to beat it--no way. But when I started getting high, I was cool, and it didn't bother me. And I wasn't lonely then, it was all right. And the chicks--I could handle them, they couldn't reach me. And I didn't know I was hooked--until I was hooked.

JAMES BALDWIN

Blues for Mister Charlie

Tags: night


They do not believe there can be tears between men. They think we are only playing a game and that we do it to shock them.

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country

Tags: Men


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


The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

JAMES BALDWIN

The Price of the Ticket

Tags: artists


When the white man came to Africa, the white man had the Bible and the African had the land, but now it is the white man who is being, reluctantly and bloodily, separated from the land, and the African who is still attempting to digest or to vomit up the Bible.

JAMES BALDWIN

The Fire Next Time


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