JAMES BALDWIN QUOTES VII

American novelist (1960- )

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

Tags: ability


It was better not to judge the man who had gone down under an impossible burden. It was better to remember: Thou knowest this man's fall, but thou knowest not his wrassling.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son


The menfolk, they die, all right. And it's us women who walk around, like the Bible says, and mourn. The menfolk, they die, and it's over for them, but we women, we have to keep on living and try to forget what they done to us.

JAMES BALDWIN

Go Tell It on the Mountain

Tags: women


My springs is getting rusty, sleeping single like I do.

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country


We cannot escape our origins, however hard we try, those origins which contain the key--could we but find it--to all we later become.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son


In those days my mother was given to the exasperating and mysterious habit of having babies.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: habit


Out of joy strength came, strength that was fashioned to bear sorrow: sorrow brought forth joy. Forever? This was Ezekiel's wheel, in the middle of the burning air forever -- and the little wheel ran by faith, and the big wheel ran by the grace of God.

JAMES BALDWIN

Go Tell It on the Mountain

Tags: joy


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

Tags: change


The best that he had ever managed in bed, so far, had been the maximum of relief with the minimum of hostility.

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country


Sometimes a minute can be a mighty powerful thing.

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country


I don't like people who like me because I'm a Negro; neither do I like people who find in the same accident grounds for contempt. I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. I think all theories are suspect, that the finest principles may have to be modified, or may even be pulverized by the demands of life, and that one must find, therefore, one's own moral center and move through the world hoping that this center will guide one aright. I consider that I have many responsibilities, but none greater than this: to last, as Hemingway says, and get my work done.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: America


One writes out of one thing only--one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: experience


The people who think of themselves as White have the choice of becoming human or irrelevant.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: choice


Negro life is in fact as debased and impoverished as our theology claims.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: life


It is really quite impossible to be affirmative about anything which one refuses to question; one is doomed to remain inarticulate about anything which one hasn’t, by an act of the imagination, made one’s own.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: imagination


It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story. It is a story which otherwise has yet to be told and which no American is prepared to hear. As is the inevitable result of things unsaid, we find ourselves until today oppressed with a dangerous and reverberating silence.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: America


Whenever the Negro face appears a tension is created, the tension of a silence filled with things unutterable.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: silence


The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality—for this touchstone can be only oneself.

JAMES BALDWIN

The Fire Next Time


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


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

Tags: ability