James Baldwin: Trending quotes

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James Baldwin: 326 quotes84 likes

“I don't believe in this nonsense about time. Time is just common, it's like water for a fish. Everybody's in this water, nobody gets out of it, or if he does the same thing happens to him that happens to the fish, he dies. And you know what happens in this water, time? The big fish eat the little fish. That's all. The big fish eat the little fish and the ocean doesn't care.”

James Baldwin book Giovanni's Room

Pt. 1, Ch. 2 - p.31
Giovanni's Room (1956)

“Literature is indispensable to the world. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way a person looks at reality, then you can change it.”

James Baldwin

“The prison is overcrowded, the calendars full, the judges busy, the lawyers ambitious, and the cops zealous. What does it matter if someone gets trapped here for a year or two, gets ruined here, goes mad here, commits murder or suicide here? It's too bad, but that's the way the cookie crumbles sometimes. I do not claim that everyone in prison here is innocent, but I do claim that the law, as it operates, is guilty, and that the prisoners, therefore, are all unjustly imprisoned. Is it conceivable, after all, that any middle-class white boy — or, indeed, almost any white boy — would have been arrested on so grave a charge as murder, with such flimsy substantiation, and forced to spend, as of this writing, three years in prison? What force, precisely, is operating when a prisoner is advised, requested, ordered, intimidated, or forced, to confess to a crime he has not committed, and promised a lighter sentence for so perjuring and debasing himself? Does the law exist for the purpose of furthering the ambitions of those who have sworn to uphold the law, or is it seriously to be considered as a moral, unifying force, the health and strength of a nation?”

James Baldwin book No Name in the Street

No Name in the Street (1972)

“I shall never be able to have any more of these boyish, zestful affairs — which are, really, when one thinks about it, a kind of higher, or, anyway, more pretentious masturbation. People are too various to be treated so lightly.”

James Baldwin book Giovanni's Room

Pt. 1, Ch. 1 - p.5
Giovanni's Room (1956)

“Nobody can stay in the garden of Eden,' Jacques said. And then: 'I wonder why.”

James Baldwin book Giovanni's Room

I have thought about Jacques' question since. Everyone, after all, goes the same dark road - and the road has a trick of being most dark, most treacherous, when it seems most bright - and it's true that nobody stays in the garden of Eden. Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden, I don't know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword. Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or.
Pt. 1, Ch. 2 - p.22
Giovanni's Room (1956)

“And, at the risk of losing forever your so remarkably candid friendship, let me tell you something. Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford, and you are not that young any more.”

James Baldwin book Giovanni's Room

Pt. 1, Ch. 2 - p.36
Giovanni's Room (1956)

“I am beginning to feel like part of a travelling circus.”

James Baldwin book Giovanni's Room

Pt. 1, Ch. 3 - p.45
Giovanni's Room (1956)

“She is smiling and her eyes are kind but now the smile is purely social”

James Baldwin book Giovanni's Room

Pt. 1, Ch. 3 - p.62
Giovanni's Room (1956)

“I felt so aimless - like a tennis ball, bouncing, bouncing - I began to wonder where I'd land.”

James Baldwin book Giovanni's Room

Pt. 2, Ch. 4 - p.108
Giovanni's Room (1956)

“The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.”

James Baldwin

"The Creative Process" (1962) originally published in The National Culture Center's Creative America (1962) and later published in The Price of the Ticket (1985)

“Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.”

James Baldwin book The Fire Next Time

The Fire Next Time (1963)

“It will be a great day for America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous and tasteless foam rubber that we have substituted for it. And I am not being frivolous here, either. Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here, and become as joyless as they have become.”

James Baldwin book The Fire Next Time

The Fire Next Time (1963)

“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. White people will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this — which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never — the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.”

James Baldwin

"Letter from a Region of My Mind" in The New Yorker (17 November 1962); republished as "Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind" in The Fire Next Time (1963)

“The brutal truth is that the bulk of white people in American never had any interest in educating black people, except as this could serve white purposes. It is not the black child's language that is in question, it is not his language that is despised: It is his experience. A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled. A child cannot be taught by anyone whose demand, essentially, is that the child repudiate his experience, and all that gives him sustenance, and enter a limbo in which he will no longer be black, and in which he knows that he can never become white. Black people have lost too many black children that way.”

James Baldwin

"If Black English Isn't a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?" http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/29/specials/baldwin-english.html in "The New York Times (29 July 1979)

“If a society permits one portion of its citizenry to be menaced or destroyed, then, very soon, no one in that society is safe. The forces thus released in the people can never be held in check, but run their devouring course, destroying the very foundations which it was imagined they would save.

But we are unbelievably ignorant concerning what goes on in our country--to say nothing of what goes on in the rest of the world--and appear to have become too timid to question what we are told. Our failure to trust one another deeply enough to be able to talk to one another has become so great that people with these questions in their hearts do not speak them; our opulence is so pervasive that people who are afraid to lose whatever they think they have persuade themselves of the truth of a lie, and help disseminate it; and God help the innocent here, that man or womn who simply wants to love, and be loved. Unless this would-be lover is able to replace his or her backbone with a steel rod, he or she is doomed. This is no place for love. I know that I am now expected to make a bow in the direction of those millions of unremarked, happy marriages all over America, but I am unable honestly to do so because I find nothing whatever in our moral and social climate--and I am now thinking particularly of the state of our children--to bear witness to their existence. I suspect that when we refer to these happy and so marvelously invisible people, we are simply being nostalgic concerning the happy, simple, God-fearing life which we imagine ourselves once to have lived. In any case, wherever love is found, it unfailingly makes itself felt in the individual, the personal authority of the individual. Judged by this standard, we are a loveless nation. The best that can be said is that some of us are struggling. And what we are struggling against is that death in the heart which leads not only to the shedding of blood, but which reduces human beings to corpses while they live.”

James Baldwin

Source: nothing personal

“It is true that two wrongs don't make a right, as we love to point out to the people we have wronged. But one wrong doesn't make a right, either.”

James Baldwin

"Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They're Anti-White" http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/29/specials/baldwin-antisem.html in The New York Times (9 April 1967) <br class="br">Context: It is true that two wrongs don't make a right, as we love to point out to the people we have wronged. But one wrong doesn't make a right, either. People who have been wronged will attempt to right the wrong; they would not be people if they didn't. They can rarely afford to be scrupulous about the means they will use. They will use such means as come to hand. Neither, in the main, will they distinguish one oppressor from another, nor see through to the root principle of their oppression.

“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 Baldwin book Giovanni's Room

Source: Giovanni's Room

“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 book Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone

Source: Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone

“Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.”

James Baldwin

"Fifth Avenue, Uptown: a Letter from Harlem" in Esquire (July 1960); republished in Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961)

“To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.”

James Baldwin