Quotes About James Baldwin

The question of identity is a question involving the most profound panic—a terror as primary as the nightmare of the mortal fall.

Out of this incredible brutality, we get the myth of the happy darky and Gone With the Wind. And the North Americans appear to believe these legends, which they have created and which absolutely nothing in reality corroborates, until today. And when these legends are attacked, as is happening now—all over a globe which has never been and never will be White—my countrymen become childishly vindictive and unutterably dangerous. The

In those days my mother was given to the exasperating and mysterious habit of having babies.

It was his hatred and his intelligence that he cherished, the one feeding the other.

despair, whether or not can be taken home and placed in the family table, must always be respected. Despair can make one monstrous, but it can also make one noble.

It is considered a rather cheerful axiom that all Americans distrust politicians. (No one takes the further and less cheerful step of considering just what effect this mutual contempt has on either the public or the politicians, who have, indeed, very little to do with one another.)

The American soil is full of corpses of my ancestors– through 400 years and at least three wars. Why is my freedom, my citizenship, in question now?

Since Negroes have been in this country their one major, devastating gain was their Emancipation, an emancipation no one regards any more as having been dictated by humanitarian impulses.

Thursday's great event was Aimé Cesaire's speech in the afternoon, dealing with the relation between colonization and culture.

Both clung to a fantasy rather than to each other, tried to suck pleasure from the crannies of the mind, rather than surrender the secrets of the body.

I had been well conditioned by the world in which I grew up, so I did not yet dare take the idea of becoming a writer seriously.

We go down the hall again, thank heaven, to my drink.

He had often thought of his loneliness, for example, as a condition which testified to his superiority.

the slackness of their bodies making vivid the history of their degradation

The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed that collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace, that Americans have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors

the whole motion of the figure is torment. It seemed a very strange figure for such a young kid to do, or, at least, it seemed strange until you thought about it.

Trouble is, I feel too paternal towards you, you son of a bitch." "That's the trouble with all you white bastards.

she looked again cold, brilliant, and bitterly helpless, a terrifying woman.

It is scarcely worthwhile to attempt remembering how many times the sun has looked down on the slaughter of the innocents.

there was about his elders an ease in the holy place, and a levity, that made his soul uneasy.

I sometimes think, with despair, that Americans will swallow whole any political speech whatever—we've been doing very little else, these last, bad years

It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death — ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.

A child is too self-centered to relate to any dilemma that does not, somehow relate to him.

You go to white movies and, like everybody else, you fall in love with Joan Crawford, and you root for the Good Guys who are killing off the Indians. It comes as a great psychological collision when you realize all of these things are really metaphors for your oppression, and will lead into a kind of psychological warfare in which you may perish