“People don't have any mercy. They tear you limb from limb, in the name of love. Then, when you're dead, when they've killed you by what they made you go through, they say you didn't have any character. They weep big, bitter tears - not for you. For themselves, because they've lost their toy.”
― James Baldwin, quote from Another Country
“We all commit our crimes. The thing is to not lie about them -- to try to understand what you have done, why you have done it. That way, you can begin to forgive yourself. That's very important. If you don't forgive yourself you'll never be able to forgive anybody else and you'll go on committing the same crimes forever.”
― James Baldwin, quote from Another Country
“The trouble with a secret life is that it is very frequently a secret from the person who lives it and not at all a secret for the people he encounters. He encounters, because he must encounter, those people who see his secrecy before they see anything else, and who drag these secrets out of him; sometimes with the intention of using them against him, sometimes with more benevolent intent; but, whatever the intent, the moment is awful and the accumulating revelation is an unspeakable anguish. The aim of the dreamer, after all, is merely to go on dreaming and not to be molested by the world. His dreams are his protection against the world. But the aims of life are antithetical to those of the dreamer, and the teeth of the world are sharp.”
― James Baldwin, quote from Another Country
“The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through. Most people had not lived -- nor could it, for that matter, be said that they had died-- through any of their terrible events. They had simply been stunned by the hammer. They passed their lives thereafter in a kind of limbo of denied and unexamined pain. The great question that faced him this morning was whether or not had had ever, really, been present at his life.”
― James Baldwin, quote from Another Country
“He leaned up a little and watched her face. Her face would now be, forever, more mysterious and impenetrable than the face of any stranger. Strangers' faces hold no secrets because the imagination does not invest them with any. But 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.”
― James Baldwin, quote from Another Country
“You took the best, so why not take the rest?”
― James Baldwin, quote from Another Country
“Love was a country he knew nothing about.”
― James Baldwin, quote from Another Country
“Perhaps now, though, he had hit bottom. One thing about the bottom, he told himself, you can't fall any further. He tried to take comfort from this thought. Yet there knocked in his heart the suspicion that the bottom did not really exist.”
― James Baldwin, quote from Another Country
“Why am I going home? he asked himself. But he knew why. It was time. In order not to lose all that he had gained, he had to move forward and risk it all.”
― James Baldwin, quote from Another Country
“You don’t know, and there’s no way in the world for you to find out, what it’s like to be a black girl in this world, and the way white men, and black men, too, baby, treat you.”
― James Baldwin, quote from Another Country
“But it’s not possible to forget anybody you were that hung up on, who was that hung up on you. You can’t forget anything that hurt so badly, went so deep, and changed the world forever. It’s not possible to forget anybody you’ve destroyed.”
― James Baldwin, quote from Another Country
“I remember what it was...to be young, very young. When everything, touching and tasting-everything- was so new, and even suffering was wonderful because it was so complete.”
― James Baldwin, quote from Another Country
“On days like this," Cass said, suddenly, "I remember what it was like--I think I remember--to be young, very young." She looked up at him. "When everything, touching and tasting--everything--was so new, and even suffering was wonderful because it was so complete.”
― James Baldwin, quote from Another Country
“Yves did not like showers, he preferred long, scalding baths, with newspapers, cigarettes, and whiskey on a chair next to the bathtub, and with Eric nearby to talk to, to shampoo his hair, and to scrub his back.”
― James Baldwin, quote from Another Country
“All for the first time, in the days when acts had no consequences and nothing was irrecoverable, and love was simple and even pain had the dignity of enduring forever: it was unimaginable that time could do anything to diminish it.”
― James Baldwin, quote from Another Country
“I remember what it was like...to be young, very young. When everything, touching and tasting-everything- was so new, and even suffering was wonderful because it was so complete.
James Baldwin”
― James Baldwin, quote from Another Country
“he was one of those poets who escaped the terrors of writing by writing all the time.”
― James Baldwin, quote from Another Country
“She marched into the street, found a liquor store and bought a bottle; and the weight of the bottle in her straw handbag somehow made everything real; as the purchase of a railroad ticket proves the imminence of a journey.”
― James Baldwin, quote from Another Country
“Observing that, from this height, the city which had been so dark as he walked through it seemed to be on fire.”
― James Baldwin, quote from Another Country
“If men don't know what's happening, what they're doing, where they're going--what are women to do? If Richard doesn't know what kind of world he wants, how am I to help him make it? What am I to tell our sons?”
― James Baldwin, quote from Another Country
“Terrifying, that the loss of intimacy with one person results in the freezing over of the world, and the loss of oneself! And terrifying that the terms of love are so rigorous, its checks and liberties so tightly bound together… Their relationship depended on her restraint… The premise of their affair, or the basis of their comedy, was that they were two independent people, who needed each other for a time, who would always be friends, but who, probably, would not always be lovers. Such a premise forbids the intrusion of the future, or too vivid an exhibition of need.”
― James Baldwin, quote from Another Country
“He wanted to go home and lock his door and sleep. He was tired of the troubles of real people. He wanted to get back to the people he was inventing, whose troubles he could bear.”
― James Baldwin, quote from Another Country
“But he had the tendency of all wildly disorganised people to suppose that the lives of others were tamer and less sensual and more cerebral than his own.”
― James Baldwin, quote from Another Country
“It’s a great city, Paris, a beautiful city––and––it was very good for me.”
― James Baldwin, quote from Another Country
“That day in Chartres they had passed through town and watched women kneeling at the edge of the water, pounding clothes against a flat, wooden board. Yves had watched them for a long time. They had wandered up and down the old crooked streets, in the hot sun; Eric remembered a lizard darting across a wall; and everywhere the cathedral pursued them. It is impossible to be in that town and not be in the shadow of those great towers; impossible to find oneself on those plains and not be troubled by that cruel and elegant, dogmatic and pagan presence. The town was full of tourists, with their cameras, their three-quarter coats, bright flowered dresses and shirts, their children, college insignia, Panama hats, sharp, nasal cries, and automobiles crawling like monstrous gleaming bugs over the laming, cobblestoned streets. Tourist buses, from Holland, from Denmark, from Germany, stood in the square before the cathedral. Tow-haired boys and girls, earnest, carrying knapsacks, wearing khaki-colored shorts, with heavy buttocks and thighs, wandered dully through the town. American soldiers, some in uniform, some in civilian clothes, leaned over bridges, entered bistros in strident, uneasy, smiling packs, circled displays of colored post cards, and picked up meretricious mementos, of a sacred character. All of the beauty of the town, all the energy of the plains, and all the power and dignity of the people seemed to have been sucked out of them by the cathedral. It was as though the cathedral demanded, and received, a perpetual, living sacrifice. It towered over the town, more like an affliction than a blessing, and made everything seem, by comparison with itself, wretched and makeshift indeed. The houses in which the people lived did not suggest shelter, or safety. The great shadow which lay over them revealed them as mere doomed bits of wood and mineral, set down in the path of a hurricane which, presently, would blow them into eternity. And this shadow lay heavy on the people, too. They seemed stunted and misshapen; the only color in their faces suggested too much bad wine and too little sun; even the children seemed to have been hatched in a cellar. It was a town like some towns in the American South, frozen in its history as Lot's wife was trapped in salt, and doomed, therefore, as its history, that overwhelming, omnipresent gift of God, could not be questioned, to be the property of the gray, unquestioning mediocre.”
― James Baldwin, quote from Another Country
“He did not seem to know enough about the people in his novel. They did not seem to trust him. They were all named, more or less, all more or less destined, the pattern he wished them to describe was clear to him. But it did not seem clear to them. He could move them about but they themselves did not move. He put words in their mouths which they uttered sullenly, unconvinced. With the same agony, or greater, with which he attempted to seduce a woman, he was trying to seduce his people: he begged them to surrender up their privacy. And they refused - without, for all their ugly intransigence, showing the faintest desire to leave him. They were waiting for him to find the key, press the nerve, tell the truth.”
― James Baldwin, quote from Another Country
“But, Cass, ask yourself, look out and ask yourself – wouldn’t you hate all white people if they kept you in prison here?’ They were rolling up startling Seventh Avenue. The entire population seemed to be in the streets, draped, almost, from lamp-posts, stoops, and hydrants, and walking through the traffic as though it were not there. ‘Kept you here, and stunted you and starved you, and made you watch your mother and father and sister and lover and brother and son and daughter die or go mad or go under, before your very eyes? And not in a hurry, like from one day to the next, but, every day, every day, for years, for generations? Shit. They keep you here because you’re black, while they go around jerking themselves off with all the jazz about the land of the free and the home of the brave. And they want you to jerk yourself off with the same music, too, only keep your distance. Some days, honey, I wish I could turn myself into one big fist and grind this miserable country to powder. Some days, I don’t believe it has a right to exist. Now, you’ve never felt like that, and Vivaldo’s never felt like that. Vivaldo didn’t want to know my brother was dying because he doesn’t want to know that my brother would still be alive if he hadn’t been born black.”
― James Baldwin, quote from Another Country
“You stop that,’ he said, in a voice which he did not recognise. ‘You stop that. You stop trying to kill me. It’s not my fault I’m white. It’s not my fault you’re black. It’s not my fault he’s dead.”
― James Baldwin, quote from Another Country
“Have you been to the police?’ Richard asked. ‘Yes.’ She made a gesture of disgust and rose and walked to the window. ‘They said it happens all the time – coloured men running off from their families. They said they’d try to find him. But they don’t care. They don’t care what happens – to a black man!’ ‘Oh, well, now,’ cried Richard, his face red, ‘is that fair? I mean, hell, I’m sure they’ll look for him just like they look for any other citizen of this city.’ She looked at him. ‘How would you know? I do know – know what I’m talking about. I say they don’t care – and they don’t care.’ ‘I don’t think you should look at it like that.”
― James Baldwin, quote from Another Country
James Baldwin
Born place: in Harlem, New York, The United States
Born date August 2, 1924
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“We are all cynics now, I suppose, and even a mewling infant knows that to save a life is to make an eternal enemy.”
― Paul Hoffman, quote from The Last Four Things
“...And you, you better run because i'm going to destroy you for what you've taken from me.”
― Samantha Young, quote from Blood Will Tell
“Waves broke, then sighed as if they were searching, not finding, then coming back, never giving up the search, returning again and again.”
― Terri Farley, quote from Seven Tears Into the Sea
“Laurence was an artist-chap, just that and nothing more, though you might make it sound more important by calling him an animal painter;”
― Saki, quote from The Complete Saki
“Let no one define how you se yourself...save God alone. See yourself through His eyes and His strength, and you'll see who you can be despite being who you are.”
― Tamera Alexander, quote from A Lasting Impression
Dance of Death
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Eaters of the Dead
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