The black man in our midst carried murder in his heart, he wanted vengeance. We carried murder too, we wanted peace.
THE SOLITARY REAPER. Behold her, single in the field, Yon solitary highland lass! Reaping and singing by herself; Stop here, or gently pass! Alone she cuts and binds the grain, And sings a melancholy...
Some of the things written during those years, justifying, for example, the execution of the Rosenbergs, or the crucifixion of Alger Hiss (and the beatification of Whittaker Chambers) taught me someth...
So that any writer, looking back over even so short a span of time as I am here forced to assess, finds that the things which hurt him and the things which helped him cannot be divorced from each othe...
She, who had descended with such joy and pain, had begun her upward climb—upward, with her baby, on the steep, steep side of the mountain.
Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself... I think now that if I had had any intimation that the self I was going to find would turn out to be only the same self from which I had spent...
Perhaps we were, all of us -pimps, whores, racketeers, church members, and children -bound together by the nature of our oppression, the specific and peculiar complex of risks we had to run; if so, wi...
People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception. Their decisions are not really decisions at...
People said that he was very nice, but I confess that his utter grotesqueness made me uneasy; perhaps in the same way that the sight of monkeys eating their own excrement turns some people’s stomachs....
People can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is t...
People always seem to band together in accordance to a principle that has nothing to do with love, a principle that releases them from personal responsibility.
Passion is not friendly. It is arrogant,superbly contemptuous of all that is notitself, and, as they very definition of passionimplies the impulse to freedom, it has a might
One of the most terrible, most mysterious things about a life is that a warning can be heeded only in retrospect: too late.
On this particular night, we were free and we had decided to treat ourselves to a really fancy, friendly dinner. There we were, at the table, all dressed up, and we’d ordered everything, and we were h...
Now, as then, we find ourselves bound, first without, then within, by the nature of our categorization. And escape is not effected through a bitter railing against this trap; it is as though this very...
My novel's about Brooklyn. The tree? Or the kids or the murderers or the junkies? Vivaldo swallowed. All of them. That's quite an assignment. And if you don't mind my saying so, it sounds just a littl...
It is not Bigger whom we fear, since his appearance among us makes our victory certain. It is the others, who smile, who go to church, who give no cause for complaint, whom we sometimes consider with...
It is a fact that every American Negro bears a name that originally belonged to the white man whose chattel he was. I am called Baldwin because I was either sold by my African tribe or kidnapped out o...
Incontestably, alas, most people are not, in action, worth very much; and yet, every human being is an unprecedented miracle. One tries to treat them as the miracles they are, while trying to protect...
In the United States, violence and heroism have been made synonymous except when it comes to blacks, and