James Baldwin
James Baldwin (1924 – 1987), full name James Arthur Baldwin, was a US writer, novelist, essayist, playwright, and civil rights activist. He grew up in a poor section of Harlem, New York. He worked in Paris and New York. His novels 'Go Tell It on the Mountain' (1953), 'Giovanni's Room' (1956), and 'Another Country' (1962) are among his notable works, apart from his collections of essays - 'Nobody Knows My Name' (1961) and 'The Price of a Ticket' (1985).Wisdom & Quotes
- It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.
- It seems to be typical of life in America... that the second generation has no time to talk to the first.
- The making of an American begins at that point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the venture of his adopted land.
- I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.
- He could be helped in a certain way only because he was hurt in a certain way; and his help is simply to be enabled to move from one conundrum to the next... from one disaster to the next.
- People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.
- Poeple are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
- Our dehumanisation of the Negro then is indivisible from our dehumanisation of ourselves; the loss of our own identity is the price we pay for our annulment of his.
- The wonder is not that so many Negro boys and girls are ruined but that so many survive.
- 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.
- If we do not now dare everything, the fulfilment of that prophecy, recreated from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us:
No more water, the fire next time!
- The fear I heard in my father's voice... when he realised that I really believed I could do anything a white body could do, and had every intention of proving it, was not at all like the fear I heard when one of us was ill or had fallen down the stairs or strayed too far from the house. It was another fear, a fear that the child, in challenging the white world's assumptions, was putting himself in the path of destruction.
- No one is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart: for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
- Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.
- Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex. You thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did.
- The questions which one asks oneself begin, at last, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.
- Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.
- 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.
- 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.
- Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
- If you're afraid to die, you will not be able to live.
- 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 strange.
- It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers, you are the Indian.
William Sloane Coffin Jr