James A. Baldwin Quotes - Page 8

Quotes about:

• Society is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void, within which, like the earth before the Word was spoken, the foundations of society are hidden.

  James A. Baldwin

  Society, Together, Foundation

  9 Copy quote

• The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

  James A. Baldwin

  Writing, Responsibility, People

  "Biography / Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

  7 Copy quote

• One can only face in others what one can face in oneself.

  James A. Baldwin

  Relationship, Faces, Oneself

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• There are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people.

  James A. Baldwin

  People, Heaven, Hatred

  "Fifth Avenue, Uptown: A Letter from Harlem". Essay by James A. Baldwin (1960), as quoted in "The Fire This Time" by David Remnick, www.newyorker.com. January 12, 2015.

  13 Copy quote

• It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian.

  James A. Baldwin

  Racism, Age, World

  16 Copy quote

• A real writer is always shifting and changing and searching.

  James A. Baldwin

  Real, Shifting

  4 Copy quote

• The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through.

  James A. Baldwin

  Knowing, Events

  5 Copy quote

• All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason. And his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours.

  James A. Baldwin

  Music, Men, Air

  9 Copy quote

• It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.

  James A. Baldwin

  Men, Doe, Prejudice

  8 Copy quote

• If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, fire next time.

  James A. Baldwin

  Song, Time, Fire

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

  4 Copy quote

• But, when the chips are down, its better to be furious with someone you love, or frightened for someone you love, than be put through the merciless horror of being ashamed of someone you love.

  James A. Baldwin

  Someone You Love, Horror, Chips

  4 Copy quote

• All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.

  James A. Baldwin

  Art, Kindness, Survival

  "Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son". Book by James A. Baldwin, 1961.

  8 Copy quote

• Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?

  James A. Baldwin

  Love, Romantic, Thinking

  55 Copy quote

• 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 forget.

  James A. Baldwin

  Pain, People, Hatred

  "Giovanni's Room". Book by James A. Baldwin, 1956.

  4 Copy quote

• The real victim of bigotry is the white man who hides his weakness under his myth of superiority.

  James A. Baldwin

  Real, Men, White Man

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• Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel.

  James A. Baldwin

  Inability, Emotion, Dishonesty

  "Everybody’s Protest Novel". Essay by James A. Baldwin (1949), as quoted in "Uneasy Rider" by Alexandra Schwartz, www.newyorker.com. November 9, 2015.

  19 Copy quote

• It will be hard James but you come from sturdy peasant stock men who picked cotton and dammed rivers and built railroads and in the teeth of the most terrifying odds achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity You come from a long line of great poets some of the greatest poets since Homer. One of them said "The very time I thought I was lost My dungeon shook and my chains fell off." You know and I know that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon. We cannot be free until they are free. God bless you James and Godspeed.

  James A. Baldwin

  Country, Men, Odds

  "A Letter to My Nephew" by James Baldwin, progressive.org. January 1, 1962.

  13 Copy quote

• The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.

  James A. Baldwin

  Black And White, People, Forever

  14 Copy quote

• To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.

  James A. Baldwin

  Respect, Thinking, Effort

  "Eighty-Five from the Archive: James Baldwin" by Erin Overbey, www.newyorker.com. February 11, 2010.

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• There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man. What is left of that man flees from what is left of human attention.

  James A. Baldwin

  Eye, Men, Attention

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• Somebody," said Jacques, "your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour - and in the oddest places! - for the lack of it.

  James A. Baldwin

  Father, Should Have, People

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• I really do believe in the New Jerusalem. I really do believe that we can all become better than we are. I know we can. But the price is enormous and people are not yet willing to pay it.

  James A. Baldwin

  Believe, People, Pay

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• Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did.

  James A. Baldwin

  Funny, Money, Sex

  "The Black Boy Looks at theWhite Boy" (1961)

  10 Copy quote

• But to look back from the stony plain along the road which led one to that place is not at all the same thing as walking on the road; the perspective to say the very least, changes only with the journey; only when the road has, all abruptly and treacherously, and with an absoluteness that permits no argument, turned or dropped or risen is one able to see all that one could not have seen from any other place.

  James A. Baldwin

  Journey, Perspective, Looks

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• What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one's heroic ancestors.

  James A. Baldwin

  America, Identity, Heroic

  "For the Love of God — and Country" by Bryan Berghoef, www.huffingtonpost.com. June 27, 2013.

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