James A. Baldwin
James A. Baldwin
James A. "Jim" Baldwinwas an American football player, track athlete, coach of football, basketball, and baseball, and college athletics administrator. He served as the head football coach at Rhode Island State College—now the University of Rhode Island, the University of Maine, Trinity College in Durham, North Carolina—now Duke University, Lehigh University, and Wake Forest University, compiling a career college football record of 41–32–14. Baldwin was also the head basketball coach at the same five schools, amassing a career college basketball...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth2 August 1924
CountryUnited States of America
To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.
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.
The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.
You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.
Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
It is dangerous to be an American Negro male. America has never wanted its Negroes to be men, and does not, generally, treat them as men. It treats them as mascots, pets, or things.
The world's definitions are one thing and the life one actually lives is quite another. One cannot allow oneself, nor one's family, friends, or lovers - to say nothing of one's children - to live according to the world's definitions: one must find a way, perpetually, to be stronger and better than that.
Allegiance, after all, has to work two ways; and one can grow weary of an allegiance which is not reciprocal.
And I was yet aware that this was only a moment, that the world waited outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched above us, longer than the sky.
People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.
It is perfectly possible to be enamoured of Paris while remaining totally indifferent or even hostile to the French.
No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.
Somebody," said Jacques, "your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour - and in the oddest places! - for the lack of it.
If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons.