Ian White1/20/2011: James Baldwin
James Arthur Baldwin (August 2, 1924 – December 1, 1987) was an American novelist, writer, playwright, poet, essayist and civil rights activist.
Most of Baldwin's work deals with racial and sexual issues in the mid-20th century in the United States. His novels are notable for the personal way in which they explore questions of identity as well as the way in which they mine complex social and psychological pressures related to being black and homosexual well before the social, cultural or political equality of these groups was improved.
American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.
Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
Be careful what you set your heart upon - for it will surely be yours.
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.
Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.
Everybody's journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.
Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.
I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.
I want to be an honest man and a good writer.
Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did.
Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
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.
Those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.
Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.
I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually
Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.
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, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death--ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.
It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind
To accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.
No man is a devil in his own mind.
Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden, I don't know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword. Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or: 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.
But, when the chips are down, its better to be furious with someone you love, or frightened for someone you love, than be put through the merciless horror of being ashamed of someone you love.
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.
Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.
Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark. Nobody knows what is going to happen to him from one moment to the next, or how one will bear it. This is irreducible. And it's true of everybody. Now, it is true that the nature of society is to create, among its citizens, an illusion of safety; but it is also absolutely true that the safety is always necessarily an illusion. Artists are here to disturb the peace.
The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat.
I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.
The poet or the revolutionary is there to articulate the necessity, but until the people themselves apprehend it, nothing can happen ... Perhaps it can't be done without the poet, but it certainly can't be done without the people. The poet and the people get on generally very badly, and yet they need each other. The poet knows it sooner than the people do. The people usually know it after the poet is dead; but that's all right. The point is to get your work done, and your work is to change the world.
