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
I want to be an honest man and a good writer.
True rebels after all, are as rare as true lovers,and in both cases, to mistake a fever for passion can destroy one's life
It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be.
The American ideal is, after all, that everyone should be as much alike as possible.
It is perfectly possible to be enamoured of Paris while remaining totally indifferent or even hostile to the French.
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.
No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.
There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.
The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
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.
Freaks are called freaks and are treated as they are treated – in the main, abominably – because they are human beings who cause to echo, deep within us, our most profound terrors and desires.
The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.
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.
We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.