JAMES BALDWIN QUOTES VIII

American novelist (1960- )


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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
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Go Tell It on the Mountain


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Tags: women


In the beginning—and neither can this be overstated—a Negro just cannot believe that white people are treating him as they do; he does not know what he has done to merit it. And when he realizes that the treatment accorded him has nothing to do with anything he has done, that the attempt of white people to destroy him—for that is what it is—is utterly gratuitous, it is not hard for him to think of white people as devils.

JAMES BALDWIN

The Fire Next Time

Tags: Merit


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


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

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: life


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 tendrils of shame clutched at them, however they turned, all the dirty words they knew commented on all they did.

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country

Tags: shame


I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be "accepted" by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don't wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet.

JAMES BALDWIN

"Letter from a Region of My Mind", The New Yorker, November 17, 1962

Tags: racism


I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it. And I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it.

JAMES BALDWIN

The Fire Next Time

Tags: crime


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

Tags: law


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

Tags: innocence


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


There is not a Negro alive who does not have this rage in his blood–one has the choice, merely, of living with it consciously or surrendering to it. As for me, this fever has recurred in me, and does, and will until the day I die.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: choice


It is this image, living yet, which we perpetually seek to evade with good works; and this image which makes of all our good works an intolerable mockery.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son


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


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

Tags: love


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

Tags: Mercy


Sometimes a minute can be a mighty powerful thing.

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country


Everyone wishes to be loved, but in the event, nearly no one can bear it. Everyone desires love but also finds it impossible to believe that he deserves it.

JAMES BALDWIN

Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone

Tags: love


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


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

Tags: life