James Baldwin: Citations en anglais
Variante: To accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.
Source: The Fire Next Time
“There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.”
Source: The Fire Next Time
"The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy" in Esquire (May 1961)
Variante: Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
Source: Nobody Knows My Name
“Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.”
Source: The Fire Next Time
Variante: I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also so much more than that. So are we all.
Source: Notes of a Native Son
“Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
Also appears in Jodi Picoult book Small Great Things
Source: In 1962 James Baldwin penned an essay titled “As Much Truth As One Can Bear” in “The New York Times Book Review”.
Contexte: We are the generation that must throw everything into the endeavor to remake America into what we say we want it to be. Without this endeavor, we will perish. ... Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
“You took the best, so why not take the rest?”
Source: Another Country
“You don't realize that you're intelligent until it gets you into trouble.”
Interview with Julius Lester, "James Baldwin: Reflections of a Maverick" in The New York Times (27 May 1984)
Variante: You don't realize that you're intelligent until it gets you into trouble.
"The Harlem Ghetto" in Commentary (February 1948); republished in Notes of a Native Son (1955)
Truce, by the way, is the best one can hope for.
Autobiographical Notes (1952)
Autobiographical Notes (1952)
"Stranger in the Village," Harper's (October 1953); republished in Notes of a Native Son (1955)
"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)
"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)
