American novelist (1960- )
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
The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality—for this touchstone can be only oneself.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Fire Next Time
In any of the world’s cities, on a winter night, a boy can be bought for the price of a beer and the promise of warm blankets.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
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
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
Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford.
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
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
Time: the whisper beneath that word is death.
JAMES BALDWIN
Just Above My Head
But that battered word, truth, having made its appearance here, confronts one immediately with a series of riddles and has, moreover, since so many gospels are preached, the unfortunate tendency to make one belligerent.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
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
Our people" have functioned in this country for nearly a century as political weapons, the trump card up the enemies' sleeve; anything promised Negroes at election time is also a threat leveled at the opposition; in the struggle for mastery the Negro is the pawn.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Fire Next Time
The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Fire Next Time
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
The roles that we construct are constructed because we feel that they will help us to survive and also, of course, because they fulfill something in our personalities; and one does not, therefore, cease playing a role simply because one has begun to understand it.... The world tends to trap you in the role you play and it is always extremely hard to maintain a watchful, mocking distance between oneself as one appears to be and oneself as one actually is.
JAMES BALDWIN
"The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy", Esquire, May 1961
The American image of the Negro lives also in the Negro's heart; and when he has surrendered to this image life has no other possible reality.
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
For, without love, pleasure withers quickly, becomes a foul taste on the palate, and pleasure’s inventions are soon exhausted.
JAMES BALDWIN
Just Above My Head
But no one was interested in the facts. They preferred the invention because this invention expressed and corroborated their hates and fears so perfectly.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son