Poems List
We 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.
[I]t had been from the first her great mistake—to meet him, to marry him, to love him as she so bitterly had. Looking at his face, it sometimes came to her that all women had been cursed from the cradle; all, in one fashion or another, being given the same cruel destiny, born to suffer the weight of men.
The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.
Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law.
The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did—which was to hide.
[W]hat frightened him, and kept him more than ever on his knees, was the knowledge that, once having fallen, nothing would be easier than to fall again. Having possessed Esther, the carnal man awoke, seeing the possibility of conquest everywhere.
Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always seem untimely.
There exists among the intolerably degraded the perverse and powerful desire to force into the arena of the actual those fantastic crimes of which they have been accused, achieving their vengeance and their own destruction through making the nightmare real.
There was no room in God’s army for the coward heart, no crown awaiting him who put mother or father, sister or brother, sweetheart or friend above God’s will. Let the church cry amen to this!
To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.
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Nascido em Harlem, Nova Iorque, Baldwin emergiu como uma voz literária crucial no meio do século XX. Seus escritos, incluindo "Go Tell It on the Mountain", "Notes of a Native Son" e "The Fire Next Time", são aclamados por sua profundidade psicológica e análise social incisiva. Ele abordou corajosamente as injustiças raciais e sociais, tornando-se um ícone para o Movimento pelos Direitos Civis. Baldwin viveu grande parte de sua vida adulta na França, onde continuou a produzir obras influentes até sua morte.