Literary Birthday – 2 August – James Baldwin

James Baldwin was born on 2 August 1924 and died on 1 December 1987.

James Baldwin Quotes

1. You write in order to change the world … if you alter, even by a millimetre, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.
2. Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.
3. You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
4. Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
5. The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
6. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.
7. People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.
8. I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.
9. I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.
10. 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.

James Baldwin was an American novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic. He was well known for his essays, collected in Notes of a Native Son, and his first novel, Go Tell It On The Mountain. Baldwin was an influential public figure and orator, especially during the civil rights movement in the United States. In the 1970s and ’80s Baldwin taught and lectured at numerous American universities, including the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Mount Holyoke College. He was awarded a number of honours, including a Guggenheim Fellowship. According to Britannica: ‘his eloquence and passion on the subject of race in America made him one of the most important voices of the 20th century. A writer of exceptionally clear and psychologically penetrating prose, Baldwin addressed race relations with deft complexity and incisive anger. He was also one of the first Black writers to include queer themes in fiction, notably in Giovanni’s Room (1956), writing with a frankness that was highly controversial at the time.’

Source for Image: Allan warren, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:James_Baldwin_37_Allan_Warren_(cropped).jpg

by Amanda Patterson

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