James Baldwin - Notes of a Native Son (1955)

33 Sourced Quotes

View all James Baldwin Quotes
Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.

James Baldwin
Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

James Baldwin
Rage cannot be hidden, it can only be dissembled. This dissembling deludes the thoughtless, and strengthens rage and adds, to rage, contempt.

James Baldwin
The American ideal, after all, is that everyone should be as much alike as possible.

James Baldwin
No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.

James Baldwin
The betrayal of a belief is not the same thing as ceasing to believe. If this were not so there would be no moral standards in the world at all.

James Baldwin
The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.

James Baldwin
Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses.

James Baldwin
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 is a story which otherwise has yet to be told and which no American is prepared to hear.

James Baldwin
The writer's greed is appalling. He wants, or seems to want, everything and practically everybody, in another sense, and at the same time, he needs no one at all.

James Baldwin
Rage can only with difficulty, and never entirely, be brought under the domination of the intelligence and is therefore not susceptible to any arguments whatever.

James Baldwin
I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.

James Baldwin
The establishment of democracy on the American continent was scarcely as radical a break with the past as was the necessity, which Americans faced, of broadening this concept to include black men.

James Baldwin
It is only because the world looks on his talent with such a frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make his talent important.

James Baldwin
This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.

James Baldwin
It seems to be typical of life in America... that the second generation has no time to talk to the first.

James Baldwin
Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the battle field.

James Baldwin
Our passion for categorization, life neatly fitted into pegs, has led to an unforeseen, paradoxical distress, confusion, a breakdown of meaning.

James Baldwin
People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state on innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.

James Baldwin
All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.

James Baldwin
We take our shape, it is true, within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth; and yet it is precisely through our dependence on this reality that we are most endlessly betrayed.

James Baldwin
My life, my real life, was in danger, and not from anything other people might do but from the hatred I carried in my own heart.

James Baldwin
I have not written about being a Negro at such length because I do not expect that to be my only subject, but only because it was the gate I had to unlock before I could hope to write about anything else.

James Baldwin
Society is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void, within which, like the earth before the Word was spoken, the foundations of society are hidden.

James Baldwin
The root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.

James Baldwin
There exists among the intolerably degraded the perverse and powerful desire to force into the arena of the actual the fantastic crimes of which they have been accused, achieving their vengeance and their own destruction through making the nightmare real.

James Baldwin
I conceive of God, in fact, as a means of liberation and not a means to control others.

James Baldwin
All over Harlem, Negro boys and girls are growing into stunted maturity, trying desperately to find a place to stand; and the wonder is not that so many are ruined but that so many survive.

James Baldwin
Our dehumanization of the Negro then is indivisible from our dehumanization of ourselves; the loss of our own identity is the price we pay for our annulment of his.

James Baldwin
Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment, unable to see and not daring to imagine what the future will now bring forth, one clings to what one knew, or dreamed that one possessed. Yet, it is only when a man is able, without bitterness or self-pity, to surrender a dream he has long cherished or a privilege he has long possessed that he is set free — he has set himself free — for higher dreams, for greater privileges.

James Baldwin