Giovanni's Room Quotes

“This lewdness was particularly revolting in that it not only failed of wit, it was so clearly an expression of contempt and self-contempt; it bubbled upward out of them like a fountain of black water. It was clear that they were tantalizing themselves with Giovanni and me and this set my teeth on edge. But Giovanni leaned back against the taxi window, allowing his arm to press my shoulder lightly, seeming to say that we should soon be rid of these old men and should not be distressed that their dirty water splashed—we would have no trouble washing it away.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room

“I have only just found out that I want to live.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room

“I will see Giovanni again, as he was that night, so vivid, so winning, all of the light of that gloomy tunnel trapped around his head”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room

“He made think of home—perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room

“But 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 to say Yes to life.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room

“He had some weird idea that it would be nice to have a bookcase sunk in the wall and he chipped through the wall until he came to the brick and began pounding away at the brick. It was hard work, it was insane work, but I did not have the energy or the heart to stop him. In a way he was doing it for me, to prove his love for me. He wanted me to stay in the room with him. Perhaps he was trying, with his own strength, to push back the encroaching walls, without, however, having the walls fall down.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room

“Well," I said, feeling myself being led by Giovanni into deep and dangerous water, "I guess people wait in order to be sure of what they feel."
"In order to make sure!" He turned again to that invisible ally and laughed again. I was beginning, perhaps, to find his phantom a little unnerving but the sound of his laughter in that airless tunnel was the most incredible sound. "It's clear that you are a true philosopher." He pointed a finger at my heart. "And when you have waited - has it made you sure?”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room

“We were not like father and son, my father sometimes proudly said, we were like buddies. I think my father sometimes actually believed this. I never did. I did not want to be his buddy; I wanted to be his son.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room

“the end of innocence is also the end of guilt”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room

“...you will go home and then you will find that home is not home anymore. Then you will really be in trouble. As long as you stay here, you can always think: One day I will go home.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room

“And, watching his face, I realized that it meant much to me that I could make his face so bright. I saw that I might be willing to give a great deal not to lose that power.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room

“Love him,' said Jacques, with vehemence, 'love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?...And if you think of them as dirty, then they will be dirty—they will be dirty because you will be giving nothing, you will be despising your flesh and his. But you can make your time together anything but dirty; you can give each other something which will make both of you better—forever—if you will not be ashamed, if you will only not play it safe.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room

“I mean you could have been fair to me by despising me a little less.’
‘I’m sorry. But I think, since you bring it up, that a lot of your life is despicable.’
‘I could say the same about yours,’ said Jacques. ‘There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain. You ought to have some apprehension that the man you see before you was once even younger than you are now and arrived at his present wretchedness by imperceptible degrees.’
There was silence for a moment, threatened, from a distance, by that laugh of Giovanni’s.
‘Tell me,’ I said at last, ‘is there really no other way for you but this? To kneel down forever before an army of boys for just five dirty minutes in the dark?’
‘Think,’ said Jacques, ‘of the men who have kneeled before you while you thought of something else and pretended that nothing was happening down there in the dark between your legs.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room

“I can see her, very elegant, tense, and glittering, surrounded by the light which fills the salon of the ocean liner, drinking rather too fast, and laughing, and watching the men.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room

“There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people‘s pain.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room