James Arthur Baldwin (1924–87) was an American novelist and civil-rights activist. He achieved international recognition for his bold expressions of the predicament and aspirations of African American life in the 1950s and 1960s.
Born in Harlem, New York City, Baldwin started preaching in revivalist churches at the age of 14. This experience inspired his first novel Go Tell It on the Mountain (1954.) Baldwin wrote it with the help of the African-American writer Richard Wright. Set in Harlem, it was semi-autobiographical and became an American classic.
Go Tell It on the Mountain was followed by such novels as Giovanni’s Room (1956,) Another Country (1962,) and Just Above My Head (1979)—all deliberate both homosexuality and the condition of African Americans.
Baldwin also wrote short stories, political and autobiographical essays, and plays. The Fire Next Time (1963) was a campaigning work for the American civil rights movement. None of his other later works achieved the popular and critical success of his early work. His influence on other American artists—such as singer Nina Simone, novelist Maya Angelou, novelist Toni Morrison—whether of spirit, love, or style, is undeniable.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by James Baldwin
He loved this street [42nd Street], not for the people or the shops but for the stone lions that guarded the great main building of the Public Library, a building filled with books and unimaginably vast, and which he had never yet dared to enter.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Libraries
It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Prejudice
Everything in life depends on how that life accepts its limits.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Acceptance
No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Prophecy
Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Love
I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Patriotism
Fires can’t be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in our daily work lightens effort and turns even labor into pleasant tasks.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Enthusiasm
There is a sanctity involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Children
A platitude is simply a truth repeated till people get tired of hearing it.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Truth
The making of an American begins at that point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Rain, America
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
—James Baldwin
Experience that destroys innocents also leads one back to it.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Experience
People can cry much easier than they can change.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Change
We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Belief
Any honest examination of the national life proves how far we are from the standard of human freedom with which we began. The recovery of this standard demands of everyone who loves this country a hard look at himself, for the greatest achievements must begin somewhere, and they always begin with the person. If we are not capable of this examination, we may yet become one of the most distinguished and monumental failures in the history of nations.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Freedom
When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Quotations
Be careful what you set your heart upon—for it will surely be yours.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Desire, Desires, Reason, Thought
We take our shape, it is true, within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth; and yet is precisely through our dependence on this reality that we are most endlessly betrayed.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Truth
We are all androgynous, not only because we are all born of a woman impregnated by the seed of a man but because each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other—male in female, female in male, white in black and black in white. We are a part of each other. Many of my countrymen appear to find this fact exceedingly inconvenient and even unfair, and so, very often, do I. But none of us can do anything about it.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Men & Women
The American ideal of sexuality appears to be rooted in the American ideal of masculinity. This idea has created cowboys and Indians, good guys and bad guys, punks and studs, tough guys and softies, butch and faggot, black and white. It is an ideal so paralytically infantile that it is virtually forbidden—as an unpatriotic act—that the American boy evolve into the complexity of manhood.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Sex
Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Perspective
The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one’s key to the experience of others.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Questioning, Questions
The paradox of education is precisely this—that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Education
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
Topics: Christians, Christianity
The greatest significance of the present student generation is that it is through them that the point of view of the subjugated is finally and inexorably being expressed.
—James Baldwin
Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Death, Dying
It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Charity, Giving
A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Education
He may be a very nice man. But I haven’t got the time to figure that out. All I know is, he’s got a uniform and a gun and I have to relate to him that way. That’s the only way to relate to him because one of us may have to die.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Control, Police
If you’re treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they’re real for you whether they’re real or not.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Society
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