Notes of a Native Son (Penguin Modern Classics)

by James Baldwin

a moral change is the only real one.

“plus c’est le même chose.” (The more it changes, the more it remains the same.)

The people who think of themselves as White have the choice of becoming human or irrelevant.

colour prejudice is not our original fault, but only one aspect of the atrophy of the imagination that prevents us from seeing ourselves in every creature that breathes under the sun.”

The story of my childhood is the usual bleak fantasy, and we can dismiss it with the restrained observation that I certainly would not consider living it again.

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent—which

he could be helped in a certain way only because he was hurt in a certain way;

and his help is simply to be enabled to move from one conundrum to the next—one is tempted to say that he moves from one disaster to the next.

change from ill-will to good-will, however motivated, however imperfect, however expressed, is better than no change at all.

price a Negro pays for becoming articulate is to find himself, at length, with nothing to be articulate about.

past is all that makes the present coherent, and further, that the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.

recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.

disastrously explicit medium of language,

Ralph Ellison,

impossible to eat enough if you’re worried about the next meal)—and

love to argue with people who do not disagree with

me too prof...

all theories are suspect, that the finest principles may have to be modified, or may even be pulverized by the demands of life, and that one must find, therefore, one’s own moral center and move through the world hoping that this center will guide one aright.

wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart;

disquieting complexity of ourselves—we are diminished and we perish; only within this web of ambiguity, paradox, this hunger, danger, darkness, can we find at once ourselves and the power that will free us from ourselves.

warfare waged daily in the heart, a warfare so vast, so relentless and so powerful that the interracial handshake or the

interracial marriage can be as crucifying as the public hanging or the secret rape.

we find ourselves bound, first without, then within, by the nature of our categorization.

take our shape, it is true, within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth; and yet it is precisely through our dependence on this reality that we are most endlessly betrayed.

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 spok...

our humanity is our burden, our life; we need not battle for it; we need only to do what is infinitely more difficult—that is, accept it.