James Baldwin - Notes of a Native Son (1955)

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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
Harlem had needed something to smash. To smash something is the ghetto's chronic need.

James Baldwin
At the rate things are going here, all of Africa will be free before we can get a lousy cup of coffee.

James Baldwin
People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

James Baldwin