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James Baldwin Biography

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“Men spoke of how the heart broke up, but never spoke of how the soul hung speechless in the pause, the void, the terror between the living and the dead; how, all garments rent and cast aside, the naked soul passed over the very mouth of Hell. Once there, there was no turning back; once there, the soul remembered, though the heart sometimes forgot.”

HeartbreakDeath Of A Loved One
Book:Go Tell it on the Mountain (Penguin Modern Classics) by James Baldwin (4-Oct-2001) Paperback
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“You can buy some more clothes, by and by, and another stereo and alll that. That’s all right, That’s not the worst. The worst thing is that you slowly begin to hate, to despise this person, this person that you loved. You hate him because he hates himself. And that’s horrible, I swear to feel your love drip out of you, drop by drop, until you empty of it and there’s just a big, hurting hole. It’s terrible, but you wish your friend had died. That way, you could have wept for him and out him away and by and by it would be all right, everything would be clean. You wouldn’t have that filthy taste of contempt and hatred on your tongue, and you wouldn’t have that hurting, empty hole. That hole I got in me right now, that hole which sends burning water and ice-cold water all up and down my spine, every time I think of Red.” He stubbed out his cigarette. “My heart”.”

HeartbreakAddiction
Book:Just Above My Head
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“She knew through what fires the soul must crawl, and with what weeping one passed over. Men spoke of how the heart broke up, but never spoke of how the soul hung speechless in the pause, the void, the terror between the living and the dead; how, all garments rent and cast aside, the naked soul passed over the very mouth of Hell. Once there, there was no turning back; once there, the soul remembered, though the heart sometimes forgot. For the world called to the heart, which stammered to reply; life, and love, and revelry, and most falsely, hope, called the forgetful, the human heart. Only the soul, obsessed with the journey it had made, and had still to make, pursued its mysterious and dreadful end; and carried heavy with weeping and bitterness the heart along.”

PhilosophyHeartbreakSoul Searching
Book:Go Tell It on the Mountain
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“She knows Daddy better than I do. I think it's because she's felt since we were children that our Daddy maybe loved me more than he loves her. This isn't true, and she knows that now--people love different people in different ways--but it must have seemed that way to her when we were little. I look as though I just can't make it, she looks like can't nothing stop her. If you look helpless, people react to you in one way and if you look strong, or just come on strong, people react to you in another way, and, since you don't see what they see, this can be very painful. I think that's why Sis was always in front of that damn mirror all the time, when we were kids. She was saying, 'I don't care. I got me.' Of course, this only made her come on stronger than ever, which was the last effect she desired: but that's the way we are and that's how we can sometimes get so fucked up. Anyway, she's past all that. She knows who she is, or, at least, she knows who she damn well isn't.”

FamilySistersFamily Relationships
Book:If Beale Street Could Talk
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“An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are. He has to tell, because nobody else in the world can tell, what it is like to be alive. All I’ve ever wanted to do is tell that, I’m not trying to solve anybody’s problems, not even my own. I’m just trying to outline what the problems are. I want to be stretched, shook up, to overreach myself, and to make you feel that way too.”

LifeWritingArtSpiritualityGrowthEmotionWritersArtistsRevelation
Author:James Baldwin
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“One would never defeat one's circumstances by working and saving one's pennies; one would never, by working, acquire that many pennies, and, besides, the social treatment accorded even the most successful Negroes proved that one needed, in order to be free, something more than a bank account. One needed a handle, a lever, a means of inspiring fear. It was absolutely clear that the police would whip you and take you in as long as they could get away with it, and that everyone else—housewives, taxi-drivers, elevator boys, dishwashers, bartenders, lawyers, judges, doctors, and grocers—would never, by the operation of any generous human feeling, cease to use you as an outlet for his frustrations and hostilities.”

PovertyRacismOppression
Book:The Fire Next Time
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“Here was the South Side--a million in captivity--stretching from this doorstep as far as the eye could see. And they didn't even read; depressed populations don't have the time or energy to spare. The affluent populations, which should have their help, didn't as far as could be discovered, read, either--they merely bought books and devoured them, but not in order to learn: in order to learn new attitudes.”

ReadingPoverty
Book:The Fire Next Time
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“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. The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity. But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around.”

PhilosophyWisdomGovernmentSchoolEducationConsciousnessSocietyAwarenessIdentityQuestioning
Author:James Baldwin
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“I began to realize it in Spain--that I wasn't free, that I couldn't be free until I was attached--no, committed--to someone." "To someone? Not something?" She was silent. "I don't know," she said at last, "but I'm beginning to think that women get attached to something really by default. They'd give it up, if they could, anytime, for a man. Of course they can't admit this, and neither can most of them let go of what they have. But I think it kills them--perhaps I only mean," she added, after a moment, "that it would have killed me.”

WomenRelationshipsAttachmentsCommitments
Book:Giovanni’s Room
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“In my experience - and this is a very awkward way to put it, since I don't really know what the word experience means - the strangest people in one's life are the people one has known and loved, still know and will always love. Here, both I and the vocabulary are both in trouble, for strangest does not imply stranger. A stranger is a stranger is a stranger, simply, and you watch the stranger to anticipate his next move. But the people who elicit from you a depth of attention and wonder which we helplessly call love are perpetually making moves which cannot possibly be anticipated. Eventually, you realize that it never occurred to you to anticipate their next move, not only because you couldn't but because you didn't have to: it was not a question of moving on the next move, but simply, of being present. Danger, true, you try to anticipate and you prepare yourself, without knowing it, to stand in the way of death. For the strangest people in the world are those people recognized, beneath one's senses, by one's soul - the people utterly indispensable for one's journey.”

PeopleLoveExperienceStrangers
Book:Just Above My Head
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“It was not only colored people who praised John, since they could not, John felt, in any case really know; but white people also said it, in fact had said it first and said it still. It was when John was five years old and in the first grade that he was first noticed; and since he was noticed by an eye altogether alien and impersonal, he began to perceive, in wild uneasiness, his individual existence.”

Self EsteemIdentityRacismRespectSelf RespectIndividualismRace RelationsAngstRacism In AmericaRace And Racism In AmericaSelf ActualizationRespectabilityIdentity CrisisRacism And CultureIdentity Confusion
Book:Go Tell It on the Mountain
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“The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality - for this touchstone can be only oneself. Such a person interpose between himself and reality nothing less than a labyrinth of attitudes. And these attitudes, furthermore, though the person is usually unaware of it (is unaware of so much), are historical and public attitudes.”

CultureSocietySelf DeceptionIntrojectsConditions Of WorthReceived Values
Book:The Fire Next Time
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“A great deal of what I say just leaves me open, I suppose, to a vast amount of misunderstanding. A great deal of what I say is based on an assumption which I hold and don’t always state. You know my fury about people is based precisely on the fact that I consider them to be responsible, moral creatures who so often do not act that way. But I am not surprised when they do. I am not that wretched a pessimist, and I wouldn’t sound the way I sound if I did not expect what I expect from human beings, if I didn’t have some ultimate faith and love, faith in them and love for them. You see, I am a human being too, and I have no right to stand in judgment of the world as though I am not a part of it. What I am demanding of other people is what I am demanding of myself.”

LoveResponsibilityHumanismBenefit Of Doubt
Book:A Rap on Race
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“You do not,’ cried Giovanni, sitting up, ‘love anyone! You never have loved anyone, I am sure you never will! You love your purity, you love your mirror—you are just like a little virgin, you walk around with your hands in front of you as though you had some precious metal, gold, silver, rubies, maybe diamonds down there between your legs! You will never give it to anybody, you will never let anybody touch it—man or woman. You want to be clean. You think you came here covered with soap and you think you will go out covered with soap—and you do not want to stink, not even for five minutes, in the meantime.’ He grasped me by the collar, wrestling and caressing at once, fluid and iron at once: saliva spraying from his lips and his eyes full of tears, but with the bones of his face showing and the muscles leaping in his arms and neck. ‘You want to leave Giovanni because he makes you stink. You want to despise Giovanni because he is not afraid of the stink of love. You want to kill him in the name of all your lying little moralities. And you—you are immoral. You are, by far, the most immoral man I have met in all my life. Look, look what you have done to me. Do you think you could have done this if I did not love you? Is this what you should do to love?”

Love
Book:Giovanni’s Room
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“Quite unpredictable things happen when the bulk of the population attains what we think of as a high cultural level... This, I think, is because the effort of a Schoenberg or a Picasso…or a William Faulkner or an Albert Camus…has nothing to do, at bottom, with physical comfort, or indeed with comfort of any other kind. But the aim of the people who rise to this high cultural level...is precisely comfort for the body and the mind. The artistic objects by which they are surrounded cannot possibly fulfill their original function of disturbing the peace...which is still the only method by which the mind can be improved...they bear witness instead to the attainment of a certain level of economic stability and a certain thin measure of sophistication. But art and ideas come out of the passion and torment of experience: it is impossible to have a real relationship to the first if one’s aim is to be protected from the second.”

Life Philosophy
Author:James Baldwin
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“It takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.”

StrengthHeroMadnessMemoryInnocenceHeroes
Book:Giovanni’s Room
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“He smiled, "Why, you will go home and then you will find that home is not home anymore. Then you will really be in trouble. As long as you stay here, you can always think: One day I will go home." He played with my thumb and grinned. "N'est-ce pas?" "Beautiful logic," I said. "You mean I have a home to go to as long as I don't go there?" He laughed. "Well, isn't it true? You don't have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.”

HomeDialogueParadoxJames BaldwinGiovanni S Room
Book:Giovanni’s Room
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