James Baldwin Quotes

• 

  Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.

  James Baldwin

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Changed, Faced
• 

  If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.

  James Baldwin

  Topics in God, Religion

  Tags in Concept, Validity

• This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.

  James Baldwin

  Topics in Art

• The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.

  James Baldwin

  Topics in Art

• Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.

  James Baldwin

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Philosophy

• If they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.

  James Baldwin

  Topics in Uncategorized

• It comes as a great shock around the age of five, six or seven to discover that the flag to which you have pledged your allegiance, along with everybody else, has not pledged its allegiance to you. It comes as a shock to see Gary Cooper killing off the Indians and, although you are rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians are you.

  James Baldwin

  Topics in Uncategorized

• The Fire Next Time.

  James Baldwin

  Topics in Uncategorized

• 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.

  James Baldwin

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them. They must, they have no other models.

  James Baldwin

  Topics in Uncategorized

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

• I learned in New Jersey that to be a Negro meant, precisely, that one was never looked at but was simply at the mercy of the reflexes the color of one’s skin caused in other people.

  James Baldwin

  Topics in Uncategorized

• It seems to be typical of life in America, where opportunities, real and fancied, are thicker than any where else on the globe, that the second generation has no time to talk to the first.

  James Baldwin

  Topics in Uncategorized

• At the root of the American Negro problem is the necessity of the American white man to find a way of living with the Negro in order to be able to live with himself.

  James Baldwin

  Topics in Uncategorized

• 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.

  James Baldwin

  Topics in Fear, Suffering

  Tags in Hatred

• 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

  Topics in Art

• You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.

  James Baldwin

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Books, Reading

• Parenting is not an intellectual endeavor. It does not emanate from the head. If it did, the smartest people would be the best parents, and I have never noticed that. Good parenting is rooted is a matter of how rooted you are in the steady soil of common sense. The heart and the gut are what make a good parent, not the head. Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.

  James Baldwin

  Topics in Family

• It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.

  James Baldwin

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Tormented, Books

• Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.

  James Baldwin

  Topics in Inspirational

James Baldwin (106)

Birth:	2nd August, 1924
Death:	1987
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Essayist, Novelist, Playwright, Poet, Screenwriter

About

James Arthur Baldwin was born in Harlem, New York City, New York, USA. He was an American novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, activist and social critic. He wrote several books include: Go Tell It on the Mountain(Semi-autobiographical novel), The Amen Corner(play), Notes of a Native Son(essays), Giovanni's Room(novel), Nobody Knows My Name(essays), Another Country(novel), The Fire Next Time(essays), Blues for Mister Charlie(play), Going to Meet the Man(Short stories), Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone(novel), No Name in the Street(essays), If Beale Street Could Talk(novel), The Devil Finds Work(essay), Just Above My Head(novel), Jimmy's Blues(poem), The Evidence of Things Not Seen(essays), The Price of the Ticket(essays), Jimmy's Blues and Other Poems, A Rap on Race(with Margaret Mead), A Dialogue(with Nikki Giovanni), and Little Man Little Man(children's novel). He wrote several films include: Go Tell It on the Mountain(TV film), Where the Heart Is, and I Am Not Your Negro(nominated- Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature).

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Today's Anniversary - 25th December

Births

• 1949 - Sissy Spacek
• 1975 - Rob Mariano
• 1971 - Dido Armstrong
• 1946 - Larry Csonka
• 1958 - Rickey Henderson

Deaths

• 1935 - Paul Bourget
• 1954 - Liberty Hyde Bailey
• 1962 - Warren R. Austin
• 1938 - Karel Capek
• 1676 - Sir Matthew Hale