James A. Baldwin Quotes - Page 15

Quotes about:

• I want to be an honest man and a good writer.

  James A. Baldwin

  Honesty, Men, Literature

  "Notes of a Native Son". Book by James A. Baldwin, archive.nytimes.com. 1955.

  5 Copy quote

• The question of sexual dominance can exist only in the nightmare of that soul which has armed itself, totally, against the possibility of the changing motion of conquest and surrender, which is love.

  James A. Baldwin

  Love, Soul, Dominance

  7 Copy quote

• Voyagers discover that the world can never be larger than the person that is in the world; but it is impossible to foresee this, it is impossible to be warned.

  James A. Baldwin

  Travel, War, World

  8 Copy quote

• The relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others in order to end the racial nightmare and acheive our country.

  James A. Baldwin

  Country, Order, Lovers

  "Another Country" by Claudia Roth Pierpont, www.newyorker.com. February 9, 2009.

  5 Copy quote

• These boys, now, were living as we'd been living then, they were growing up with a rush and their heads bumped abruptly against the low ceiling of their actual possibilities. They were filled with rage. All they really knew were two darknesses, the darkness of their lives, which were now closing in on them, and the darkness of the movies, which had blinded them to that other darkness, and in which they now, vindictively, dreamed, at once more together than they were at any other time, and more alone.

  James A. Baldwin

  Growing Up, Boys, Two

  4 Copy quote

• Years ago, when he was around fourteen, he'd been all hipped on the idea of going to India. He read books about people sitting on rocks, naked, in all kinds of weather, but mostly bad, naturally, and walking barefoot through hot coals and arriving at wisdom. I used to say that it sounded to me as though they were getting away from wisdom as fast as they could. I think he sort of looked down on me for that.

  James A. Baldwin

  Book, Thinking, Rocks

  4 Copy quote

• Rage can only with difficulty, and never entirely, be brought under the domination of the intelligence, and therefore is not susceptible to any arguments whatsoever.

  James A. Baldwin

  Anger, Argument, Rage

  6 Copy quote

• The making of an American begins at the point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land.

  James A. Baldwin

  Land, Ties, Justice

  13 Copy quote

• We take our shape, it is true, within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth; and yet it is precisely through our dependence on this reality that we are most endlessly betrayed.

  James A. Baldwin

  Truth, Reality, Shapes

  8 Copy quote

• Fonny and I just sat there... while the voices of the congregation rose and rose around us, without mercy... Teddy had the tambourine, and gave the cue to the piano player-I never got to know him: a long dark, evil-looking brother, with hands made for strangling; and with these hands he attacked the keyboard like he was beating the brains out of someone he remembered. No doubt the congregation had their memories, too, and they went to pieces. The church began to rock.

  James A. Baldwin

  Music, Brother, Memories

  4 Copy quote

• It was as though we were a picture, trapped in time: this had been happening for hundreds of years, people sitting in a room, waiting for dinner, and listening to the blues.

  James A. Baldwin

  Music, Years, People

  4 Copy quote

• The establishment of democracy on the American continent was scarcely as radical a break with the past as was the necessity, which Americans faced, of broadening this concept to include black men.

  James A. Baldwin

  Past, Men, Black

  71 Copy quote

• I'm beginning to think that maybe everything that happens makes sense. Like, if it didn't make sense, how could it happen?

  James A. Baldwin

  Life, Thinking, Make Sense

  4 Copy quote

• European society has always been divided into classes in a way that American society never has been. A European writer considers himself to be part of an old and honorable tradition--of intellectual activity, of letters--and his choice of a vocation does not cause him any uneasy wonder as to whether or not it will cost him all his friends. But this tradition does not exist in America.

  James A. Baldwin

  Class, America, Choices

  4 Copy quote

• All of Africa will be free before we can get a lousy cup of coffee.

  James A. Baldwin

  Coffee, Cups, Coffee Cup

  "A Negro Assays on the Negro Mood" by James A. Baldwin, The New York Times (March 12, 1961), later published as "East River, Downtown: Postscript to a Letter from Harlem" in James A. Baldwin "Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son", July 1961.

  6 Copy quote

• Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.

  James A. Baldwin

  One Day, Earth, Lasts

  "Letter from a Region in My Mind" by James Baldwin, www.newyorker.com. November 17, 1962.

  5 Copy quote

• Nakedness has no color: this can come as news only to those who have never covered, or been covered by, another naked human being.

  James A. Baldwin

  Inspirational, Sex, Color

  4 Copy quote

• I prefer sinners and madmen, who can learn, who can change, who can teach-or people like myself, if I may say so, who are not afraid to eat a lobster alone as they take on their shoulders the monumental weight of thirty years

  James A. Baldwin

  Years, People, Lobster

  4 Copy quote

• Americans should never come to Europe,' she said, and tried to laugh and began to cry, 'it means they never can be happy again. What's the good of an American who isn't happy? Happiness was all we had.

  James A. Baldwin

  Mean, Europe, Laughing

  4 Copy quote

• how can one respect, let alone adopt, the values of a people who do not, on any level whatever, live the way they say they do, or the way they say they should?

  James A. Baldwin

  People, Levels, Way

  "Letter from a Region in My Mind" by James Baldwin, www.newyorker.com. November 17, 1962.

  4 Copy quote

• Whoever is born in New York is ill-equipped to deal with any other city: all other cities seem, at best, a mistake, and, at worst, a fraud. No other city is so spitefully incoherent. Whereas other cities flaunt there history - their presumed glory - in vividly placed monuments, squares, parks, plaques, and boulevards, such history as New York has been unable entirely to obliterate is to be found, mainly, in the backwaters of Wall Street, in the goat tracks of Old and West Broadway, in and around Washington Square, and, for the relentless searcher, in grimly inaccessible regions of The Bronx.

  James A. Baldwin

  New York, Wall, Mistake

  9 Copy quote

• If I could make you stay, I would,’ he shouted. ‘If I had to beat you, chain you, starve you—if I could make you stay, I would.’ He turned back into the room; the wind blew his hair. He shook his finger at me, grotesquely playful. ‘One day, perhaps, you will wish I had.

  James A. Baldwin

  Hair, Wind, Wish

  4 Copy quote

• I was guilty and irritated and full of love and pain. I wanted to kick him and I wanted to take him in my arms.

  James A. Baldwin

  Pain, Arms, Irritated

  4 Copy quote

• He leaned up a little and watched her face. Her face would now be, forever, more mysterious and impenetrable than the face of any stranger. Strangers' faces hold no secrets because the imagination does not invest them with any. But the face of a lover is an unknown precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.

  James A. Baldwin

  Imagination, Forever, Secret

  5 Copy quote

• One writes out of one thing only - one's own experience.

  James A. Baldwin

  Writing, One Thing

  "Autobiographical Notes" by James A. Baldwin (1952), republished in James A. Baldwin "Notes of a Native Son" (1955), archive.nytimes.com.

  4 Copy quote

Page 15 of 16

First

← Prev

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

Next →

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin