JAMES BALDWIN QUOTES III

American novelist (1960- )


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Time: the word tolled like the bells of a church.

JAMES BALDWIN
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If Beale Street Could Talk


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Tags: church


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


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


And he knew again that she was not saying everything she meant; in a kind of secret language she was telling him today something that he must remember and understand tomorrow.

JAMES BALDWIN

Go Tell It on the Mountain

Tags: language


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


She seemed to listen to life as though life were the most cunning and charming of confidence men: knowing perfectly well that she was being conned, she, nevertheless, again and again, gave the man the money for the Brooklyn Bridge. She never gained possession of the bridge, of course, but she certainly learned how to laugh. And the tiny lines in her face had been produced as much by laughter as by loss.

JAMES BALDWIN

Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone

Tags: life


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


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

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country


A civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.

JAMES BALDWIN

The Fire Next Time

Tags: civilization


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


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


She marched into the street, found a liquor store and bought a bottle; and the weight of the bottle in her straw handbag somehow made everything real; as the purchase of a railroad ticket proves the imminence of a journey.

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country


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

JAMES BALDWIN

Giovanni's Room


And the applause functions, then, in part, to pacify, narcotize, the resulting violent and inescapable discomfort.

JAMES BALDWIN

Just Above My Head


The taste for obscenity is universal and the appetite for reality rare and hard to cultivate.

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country

Tags: reality


Our dehumanization of the Negro then is indivisible from our dehumanization of ourselves: the loss of our own identity is the price we pay for our annulment of his.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: identity


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

JAMES BALDWIN

If Beale Street Could Talk

Tags: love


He had often watched her as she crossed the floor in her checkered apron, her face a dark mask behind which belligerence battled with humility. This was in her eyes which never for an instant lost their wariness and which were always ready, within a split second, to turn black and lightless with contempt.

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country

Tags: contempt


The great question that faced him this morning was whether or not he had ever, really, been present at his life. For if he had ever been present, then he was present still, and his world would open up before him.

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country

Tags: life