American novelist (1960- )
But just as a society must have a scapegoat, so hatred must have a symbol.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
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
The people who think of themselves as White have the choice of becoming human or irrelevant.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
Sometimes a minute can be a mighty powerful thing.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
In those days my mother was given to the exasperating and mysterious habit of having babies.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
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
My springs is getting rusty, sleeping single like I do.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
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
The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality—for this touchstone can be only oneself.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Fire Next Time
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
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
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
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
Time: the whisper beneath that word is death.
JAMES BALDWIN
Just Above My Head
The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
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
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
Negro life is in fact as debased and impoverished as our theology claims.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
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
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