American novelist (1960- )
The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Fire Next Time
For I am—or I was—one of those people who pride themselves in on their willpower, on their ability to make a decision and carry it through. This virtue, like most virtues, is ambiguity itself. People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception. Their decisions are not really decisions at all—a real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things than can be named—but elaborate systems of evasion, of illusion, designed to make themselves and the world appear to be what they and the world are not.
JAMES BALDWIN
Giovanni's Room
Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the field of battle.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
It was the Lord who knew of the impossibility every parent in that room faced: how to prepare the child for the day when the child would be despised and how to create in the child - by what means? - a stronger antidote to this poison than one had found for oneself.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
JAMES BALDWIN
"The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy", Esquire, May 1961
Most of us are about as eager to change as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.
JAMES BALDWIN
"As Much Truth As One Can Bear", New York Times Book Review, January 14, 1962
The rebirth of the soul is perpetual; only rebirth every hour could stay the hand of Satan.
JAMES BALDWIN
Go Tell It on the Mountain
Most people had not lived -- nor could it, for that matter, be said that they had died-- through any of their terrible events. They had simply been stunned by the hammer. They passed their lives thereafter in a kind of limbo of denied and unexamined pain.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
Perhaps now, though, he had hit bottom. One thing about the bottom, he told himself, you can't fall any further. He tried to take comfort from this thought. Yet there knocked in his heart the suspicion that the bottom did not really exist.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
Negro life is in fact as debased and impoverished as our theology claims.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.
JAMES BALDWIN
"Letter from a Region of My Mind", The New Yorker, November 17, 1962
She fitted in my arms, she always had, and the shock of holding her caused me to feel that my arms had been empty since she had been away.
JAMES BALDWIN
Giovanni's Room
His mind was like the sea itself: troubled, and too deep for the bravest man's descent, throwing up now and again, for the naked eye to wonder at, treasure and debris long forgotten on the bottom—bones and jewels, fantastic shells, jelly that had once been flesh, pearls that had once been eyes. And he was at the mercy of this sea, hanging there with darkness all around him.
JAMES BALDWIN
Go Tell It on the Mountain
I come out of streets where life itself--life itself!--depends on timing more infinitesimal than the split second, where apprehension must be swifter than the speed of light.
JAMES BALDWIN
Just Above My Head
The people who think of themselves as White have the choice of becoming human or irrelevant.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
The impossible is the least that one can demand.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Fire Next Time
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.
JAMES BALDWIN
Giovanni's Room
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.
JAMES BALDWIN
Go Tell It on the Mountain