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
James A. Baldwin quotes about
If you really want to know something about solitude, become famous.
European society has always been divided into classes in a way that American society never has been. A European writer considers himself to be part of an old and honorable tradition--of intellectual activity, of letters--and his choice of a vocation does not cause him any uneasy wonder as to whether or not it will cost him all his friends. But this tradition does not exist in America.
One cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one's own.
You know, it's not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.
Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.
A devotion to humanity is... too easily equated with a devotion to a Cause, and Causes, as we know, are notoriously bloodthirsty.
The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did - which was to hide.
Such figures as Boy George do not disturb me nearly so much as do those relentlessly hetero (sexual?) keepers of the keys and seals, those who know what the world needs in the way of order and who are ready and willing to supply that order.
The male cannot bear very much humiliation; and he really cannot bear it, it obliterates him.
Remember, to hate, to be violent, is demeaning. It means you're afraid of the other side of the coin -- to love and be loved.
The wretched of the earth do not decide to become extinct, they resolve, on the contrary, to multiply: life is their weapon against life, life is all that they have.
I must oppose any attempt that Negroes may make to do to others what has been done to them. . . . I know the spiritual wasteland to which that road leads . . . whoever debases others is debasing himself.
After departure, only invisible things are left, perhaps the life of the world is held together by invisible chains of memory and loss and love. So many things, so many people, depart! And we can only repossess them in our minds.
Secrets hidden at the heart of midnight are simply waiting to be dragged to the light, as, on some unlucky high noon, they always are. But secrets shrouded in the glare of candor are bound to defeat even the most determined and agile inspector for the light is always changing and proves that the eye cannot be trusted.