51 Quotes About 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.

Beneath these faces, these clothes, accents, rudeness, was power and sorrow, both unadmitted, unrealized, the power of inventors, the sorrow of the disconnected.

To be androgynous, Webster's informs us, is to have both male and female characteristics. This means that there is a man in every woman, and a woman in every man. Sometimes this is recognised only when the chips are, brutally, down - when there is no longer any way to avoid this recognition. But love between a man and a woman, or love between any two human beings, would not be possible did we not have available to us the spiritual resources of both sexes.

Whose little boy are you?

I had to get out of there for my face showed too much, the war in my body was dragging me down. My feet refused to carry me over to him again. The wind of my life was blowing me away.

I do not know what I would do if you left me." For the first time I felt the suggestion of a threat in his voice—or I put it there. "I have been alone so long—I do not think I would be able to live if I had to be alone again.

Yet, if the American Negro has arrived at his identity by virtue of the absoluteness of his estrangement from his past, American white men still nourish the illusion that there is some means of recovering the European innocence, of returning to a state in which black men do not exist.

On each piece of paper I found addresses, telephone numbers, memos of various rendezvous made and kept—or perhaps not kept—people met and remembered, or perhaps not remembered, hopes probably not fulfilled: certainly not fulfilled, or I would not have been standing on that street corner.

You can not describe anything without betraying your point of view, your aspirations, your fears, your hopes. Everything.