James A. Baldwin Quotes - Page 15

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• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• My friend was about to introduce me when she looked at me and smiled and said, "Whose little boy are you?"

  James A. Baldwin

  Boys, African American, Littles

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

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• Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always seem untimely.

  James A. Baldwin

  Death, Institutions, Cases

  4 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

• In the invincible and indescribable squalor of Harlem ... I was tormented. I felt caged, like an animal. I wanted to escape. I felt if I did not get out I would slowly strangle.

  James A. Baldwin

  Animal, Harlem, Invincible

  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

• 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

• 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

• 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

  7 Copy quote

• Negro servants have been smuggling odds and ends out of white homes for generations, and white people have been delighted to have them do it, because it has assuaged a dim guilt and testified to the intrinsic superiority of white people.

  James A. Baldwin

  Home, Odds, White

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

  6 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

• Employment is my right my destiny.

  James A. Baldwin

  Destiny, Employment, My Destiny

  4 Copy quote

• There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that *they* must accept *you*. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love.

  James A. Baldwin

  Mean, White, People

  4 Copy quote

• The greatest significance of the present student generation is that it is through them that the point of view of the subjugated is finally and inexorably being expressed.

  James A. Baldwin

  Views, Generations, Students

  7 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

• The American ideal of sexuality appears to be rooted in the American ideal of masculinity. This idea has created cowboys and Indians, good guys and bad guys, punks and studs, tough guys and softies, butch and faggot, black and white. It is an ideal so paralytically infantile that it is virtually forbidden - as an unpatriotic act - that the American boy evolve into the complexity of manhood

  James A. Baldwin

  Black And White, Boys, Cowboy

  10 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

• 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

• There is no way of conveying to the corpse the reasons you have made him one--you have the corpse, and you are, thereafter, at themercy of a fact which missed the truth, which means that the corpse has you.

  James A. Baldwin

  Mean, Way, Facts

  4 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

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• People said that he was very nice, but I confess that his utter grotesqueness made me uneasy; perhaps in the same way that the sight of monkeys eating their own excrement turns some people’s stomachs. They might not mind so much if monkeys did not- so grotesquely- resemble human beings.

  James A. Baldwin

  Nice, Sight, People

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• 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

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