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 I could make you stay, I would,’ he shouted. ‘If I had to beat you, chain you, starve you—if I could make you stay, I would.’ He turned back into the room; the wind blew his hair. He shook his finger at me, grotesquely playful. ‘One day, perhaps, you will wish I had.
I was guilty and irritated and full of love and pain. I wanted to kick him and I wanted to take him in my arms.
how can one respect, let alone adopt, the values of a people who do not, on any level whatever, live the way they say they do, or the way they say they should?
...in order for this to happen, your entire frame of reference will have to change, and you will be forced to surrender many things that you now scarcely know you have.
America sometimes resembles, at least from the point of view of a black man, an exceedingly monotonous minstrel show; the same dances, same music, same jokes. One has done (or been) the show so long that one can do it in one’s own sleep.
Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore
For nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.
Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment, unable to see and not daring to imagine what the future will now bring forth, one clings to what one knew, or dreamed that one possessed. Yet, it is only when a man is able, without bitterness or self-pity, to surrender a dream he has long possessed that he is set free - he has set himself free - for higher dreams, for greater privileges.
Tell me, he said, "What is this thing about time? Why is it better to be late than early? People are always saying, we must wait, we must wait. what are they waiting for?" "Well […] I guess people wait in order to make sure of what they feel." "And when you have waited—-has it made you sure?
When you're writing you're trying to find out something which you don't know.
One can only face in others what one can face in oneself.
All racists are irresponsible.
You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
The determination to outwit one's situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.