James Baldwin: Trending quotes

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James Baldwin: 326 quotes84 likes

“You took the best, so why not take the rest?”

Source: Another Country

“This is the charged, the dangerous moment, when everything must be re-examined, must be made new, when nothing at all can be taken for granted.”

James Baldwin

“Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did.”

James Baldwin book Sonny's Blues

Source: Sonny's Blues

“You don't realize that you're intelligent until it gets you into trouble.”

James Baldwin

Interview with Julius Lester, "James Baldwin: Reflections of a Maverick" in The New York Times (27 May 1984)
Variant: You don't realize that you're intelligent until it gets you into trouble.

“All over Harlem, Negro boys and girls are growing into stunted maturity, trying desperately to find a place to stand; and the wonder is not that so many are ruined but that so many survive.”

James Baldwin

"The Harlem Ghetto" in Commentary (February 1948); republished in Notes of a Native Son (1955)

“When one begins looking for influences one finds them by the score. I haven't thought much about my own, not enough anyway; I hazard that the King James Bible, the rhetoric of the store-front church, something ironic and violent and perpetually understated in Negro speech — and something of Dickens' love for bravura — have something to do with me today; but I wouldn't stake my life on it. Likewise, innumerable people have helped me in many ways; but finally, I suppose, the most difficult (and most rewarding) thing in my life has been the fact that I was born a Negro and was forced, therefore, to effect some kind of truce with this reality.”

James Baldwin

Truce, by the way, is the best one can hope for.
Autobiographical Notes (1952)

“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. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.”

James Baldwin

Autobiographical Notes (1952)

“Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one’s beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses.”

James Baldwin

"Stranger in the Village," Harper's (October 1953); republished in Notes of a Native Son (1955)

“I have not written about being a Negro at such length because I do not expect that to be my only subject, but only because it was the gate I had to unlock before I could hope to write about anything else.”

James Baldwin

"The Hard Kind of Courage" in Harper's (October 1958) republished as "A Fly in Buttermilk" in Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961)

“Now, leaving aside all the physical factors one can quote — leaving aside the rape or murder, leaving aside the bloody catalogue of oppression which we are too familiar with any way — what the system does to the subjugated is to destroy his sense of reality. It destroys his father's authority over him. His father can no longer tell him anything because his past has disappeared.”

James Baldwin

"The American Dream and the American Negro" http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/29/specials/baldwin-dream.html in The New York Times (7 March 1965)

“The betrayal of a belief is not the same thing as ceasing to believe. If this were not so there would be no moral standards in the world at all.”

James Baldwin book Notes of a Native Son

Stranger in the Village http://harpers.org/archive/1953/10/stranger-in-the-village/ Harper's Magazine (October 1953); republished in Notes of a Native Son http://books.google.com/books?id=B0N2AAAAMAAJ&q=%22The+betrayal+of+a+belief+is+not+the+same+thing+as+ceasing+to+believe+If+this+were+not+so+there+would+be+no+moral+standards+in+the+world+at+all%22&pg=PA171#v=onepage (1955)

“Christianity has operated with an unmitigated arrogance and cruelty — necessarily, since a religion ordinarily imposes on those who have discovered the true faith the spiritual duty of liberating the infidels.”

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)

“If the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.”

James Baldwin book The Fire Next Time

The Fire Next Time http://books.google.com/books?id=0S9TgXJ-aD0C&q=%22If+the+word+integration+means+anything+this+is+what+it+means+that+we+with+love+shall+force+our+brothers+to+see+themselves+as+they+are+to+cease+fleeing+from+reality+and+begin%22&pg=PA21#v=onepage (1963)

“At the rate things are going here, all of Africa will be free before we can get a lousy cup of coffee.”

James Baldwin

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

“I conceive of God, in fact, as a means of liberation and not a means to control others.”

James Baldwin

"In Search of a Majority" address delivered at Kalamazoo College (February 1960); republished in Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961)

“When the South has trouble with its Negroes — when the Negroes refuse to remain in their "place" — it blames "outside agitators" and "Northern interference." When the nation has trouble with the Northern Negro, it blames the Kremlin.”

James Baldwin

As quoted in "Trapped Inside James Baldwin" by Michael Anderson http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/29/reviews/980329.29anderst.html, a review of Baldwin's Collected Essays in The New York Times (29 March 1998)

“Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark. Nobody knows what is going to happen to him from one moment to the next, or how one will bear it. This is irreducible. And it's true of everybody. Now, it is true that the nature of society is to create, among its citizens, an illusion of safety; but it is also absolutely true that the safety is always necessarily an illusion. Artists are here to disturb the peace.”

James Baldwin

"An interview with James Baldwin" (1961), in Conversations with James Baldwin, p. 21

“Words like "freedom," "justice," "democracy" are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous and, above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply.”

James Baldwin

"The Crusade of Indignation," The Nation (New York, 7 July 1956), published in book form in The Price of the Ticket (1985)

“The celebrity never sees himself. I have some idea what I'm doing on that stage; above all, I have some idea what sustains me on that stage. But the celebrity is not exactly Jimmy, though he comes out of Jimmy and Jimmy nourishes that, too. I can see now, with hindsight, that I would've had to become a celebrity in order to survive. A boy like me with all his handicaps, real and fancied, could not have survived in obscurity. I can say that it would have had to happen this way, though I could not see it coming.”

James Baldwin

Interview with Julius Lester, "James Baldwin: Reflections of a Maverick" in The New York Times (27 May 1984)

“Much has been written of love turning to hatred, of the heart growing cold with the death of love. It is a remarkable process. It is far more terrible than anything I have ever read about it, more terrible than anything I will ever be able to say.”

James Baldwin book Giovanni's Room

Pt. 2, Ch. 5 - p.139
Giovanni's Room (1956)