The Devil Finds Work Quotes

“Dickens has not seen it all. The wretched of the earth do not decide to become extinct, they resolve, on the contrary, to multiply: life is their only weapon against life, life is all that they have. This is why the dispossessed and starving will never be convinced (though some may be coerced) by the population-control programs of the civilized. I have watched the dispossessed and starving laboring in the fields which others own, with their transistor radios at their ear, all day long: so they learn, for example, along with equally weighty matters, that the pope, one of the heads of the civilized world, forbids to the civilized that abortion which is being, literally, forced on them, the wretched. The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status quo; are responsible for their slaughter and enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children whenever and wherever they decide that their ‘vital interests’ are menaced, and think nothing of torturing a man to death: these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the ‘sanctity’ of human life, or the ‘conscience’ of the civilized world. There is a ‘sanctity’ involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it. Dreadful indeed it is to see a starving child, but the answer to that is not to prevent the child’s arrival but to restructure the world so that the child can live in it: so that the ‘vital interest’ of the world becomes nothing less than the life of the child. However—I could not have said any of this then, nor is so absurd a notion about to engulf the world now. But we were all starving children, after all, and none of our fathers, even at their most embittered and enraged, had ever suggested that we ‘die out.’ It was not we who were supposed to die out: this was, of all notions, the most forbidden, and we learned this from the cradle. Every trial, every beating, every drop of blood, every tear, were meant to be used by us for a day that was coming—for a day that was certainly coming, absolutely certainly, certainly coming: not for us, perhaps, but for our children. The children of the despised and rejected are menaced from the moment they stir in the womb, and are therefore sacred in a way that the children of the saved are not. And the children know it, which is how they manage to raise their children, and why they will not be persuaded—by their children’s murderers, after all—to cease having children.”
― James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work: Essays

“To encounter oneself is to encounter the other: and this is love. If I know that my soul trembles, I know that yours does, too: and if I can respect this, both of us can live. Neither of us, truly, can live without the other: a statement which would not sound so banal if one were not so endlessly compelled to repeat it, and act on that belief.”
― James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work: Essays

“The question of identity is a question involving the most profound panic—a terror as primary as the nightmare of the mortal fall.”
― James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work: Essays

“An identity is questioned only when it is menaced...Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self...”
― James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work: Essays

“This is, perhaps, a very subtle argument, but black men do not have the same reason to hate white men as white men have to hate blacks. The root of the white man's hatred is terror, a bottomless and nameless terror, which focuses on the black, surfacing, and concentrating on this dread figure, an entity which lives only in his mind. But the root of the black man's hatred is rage, and he does not so much hate white men as simply want them out his way, and, more than that, out of his children's way.”
― James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work: Essays

“She was so incredibly beautiful—she seemed to be wearing the sunlight, rearranging it around her from time to time, with a movement of one hand, with a movement of her head, and with her smile—that, when she paid the man and started out of the store, I started out behind her.”
― James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work

“no matter what Saint Paul may thunder, love is where you find it. A man can fall in love with a man: incarceration, torture, fire, and death, and, still more, the threat of these, have not been able to prevent it, and never will. It became a grave, a tragic matter, on the North American continent, where white power became indistinguishable from the question of sexual dominance. But the question of sexual dominance can exist only in the nightmare of that soul which has armed itself, totally, against the possibility of the changing motion of conquest and surrender, which is love.”
― James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work: Essays

“It is said that the camera
cannot lie, but rarely do we allow it to do anything else, since the camera sees
what you point it at: the camera sees what you want it to see. The language of
the camera is the language of our dreams.”
― James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work: Essays

“Lord, that Hollywood train, forever coming round the bend!”
― James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work: Essays

“A story is impelled by the necessity to reveal: the aim of the story is revelation, which means that a story can have nothing—at least not deliberately—to hide. This also means that a story resolves nothing. The resolution of a story must occur in us, with what we make of the questions with which the story leaves us. A plot, on the other hand, must come to a resolution, prove a point: a plot must answer all the questions which it pretends to pose.”
― James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work: Essays

“The blacks have a song which says, 'I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do.' No American film, relating to blacks, can possibly incorporate this observation.”
― James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work: Essays

“The 'civilized' have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status quo; are responsible for their slaughter and enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children whenever and wherever they decide that their "vital interests" are menaced, and think nothing of torturing a man to death: these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the "sanctity" of human life, or the "conscience" of the civilized world.”
― James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work: Essays

“from T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, is a kind of muted and updated, excruciatingly astute version of Rudyard Kipling’s Gunga Din. The word “muted” does not refer to the musical score, which must be the loudest in the history of the cinema,”
― James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work

“I loved my country, but I could not respect it, could not, upon my soul, be reconciled to my country as it was. And I loved my work, had great respect for the craft which I was compelled to study, and wanted it to have some human use. It was beginning to be clear to me that these two loves might, never, in my life, be reconciled: no man can serve two masters.”
― James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work: Essays

“she seemed to be wearing the sunlight, rearranging it around her from time to time, with a movement of one hand, with a movement of her head, and with her smile—”
― James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work

“The distance between oneself—the audience—and a screen performer is an
absolute: a paradoxical absolute, masquerading as intimacy.”
― James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work: Essays

“It is a terrible thing, simply, to be trapped in one's history, and attempt, in the same motion (and in this, our life!) to accept, deny, reject, and redeem it--and, also, on whatever level, to profit from it.”
― James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work: Essays

“The necessity, then, of those “lesser breeds without the law”—those wogs, barbarians, niggers—is this: one must not become more free, not become more base than they: must not be used as they are used, nor yet use them as their abandonment allows one to use them: therefore, they must be civilized. But, when they are civilized, they may simply “spuriously imitate [the civilizer] back again,” leaving the civilizer with no satisfaction on which to rest.”
― James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work: Essays

“The root of the white man’s hatred is terror, a bottomless and nameless terror, which focuses on the black, surfacing, and concentrating on this dread figure, an entity which lives only in his mind. But the root of the black man’s hatred is rage, and he does not so much hate white men as simply want them out of his way, and, more than that, out of his children’s way. When”
― James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work

“This is not a Western idea, but fathers and sons arrive at that relationship only by claiming that relationship: that is, by paying for it. If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons. (But to pursue this further carries us far beyond the confines of the present discussion.)”
― James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work

“But the private life of a black woman, to say nothing of the private life of a black man, cannot really be considered at all. To consider this forbidden privacy is to violate white privacy -- by destroying the white dream of the blacks; to make black privacy a black and private matter makes white privacy real, for the first time: which is, indeed, and with a vengeance, to endanger the stewardship of Rhodesia. The situation of the white heroine must never violate the white self-image. Her situation must always transcend the inexorability of the social setting, so that her innocence may be preserved: Grace Kelly, when she shoots to kill at the end of 'High Noon,' for example, does not become a murderess. But the situation of the black heroine, to say nothing of the black hero, must always be left at society's mercy: in order to justify white history and in order to indicate the essential validity of the black condition.”
― James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work: Essays

“That the movie star is an “escape” personality
indicates one of the irreducible dangers to which the moviegoer is exposed: the
danger of surrendering to the corroboration of one’s fantasies as they are thrown
back from the screen.”
― James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work: Essays