Another Country Quotes

“It doesn't do any good to blame people or the time-- one is oneself all those people. We are the time.”
― James Baldwin, Another Country

“The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through. Most people had not lived--nor could it, for that matter, be said that they had died--through any of their terrible events. They had simply been stunned by the hammer. They passed their lives thereafter in a kind of limbo of denied and unexamined pain. The great question that faced him this morning was whether or not he had ever, really, been present at his life. For if he had ever been present, then he was present still, and his world would open up before him.”
― James Baldwin, Another Country

“I'm beginning to think,' she said, 'that growing means learning more and more about anguish. That poison becomes your diet-- you drink a little of it everyday. Once you've seen it, you can't stop seeing it-- that's the trouble. And it can, it can' -- she passed her hand wearily over her brown again-- 'drive you mad.”
― James Baldwin, Another Country

“Now that his flight was so rigorously approaching its end, a light appeared, a backward light, throwing his terrors into relief.

And what were these terrors? They were buried beneath the impossible language of the time, lived underground where nearly all of the time's true feeling spitefully and incessantly fermented. Precisely, therefore, to the extent that they were inexpressible, were these terrors mighty; precisely because they lived in the dark were their shapes obscene. And because the taste for obscenity is universal and the appetite for reality rare and hard to cultivate, he had nearly perished in the basement of his private life. Or, more precisely, his fantasies.”
― James Baldwin, Another Country

“They were oddly equal: perhaps each could teach the other, concerning love, what neither now knew. And they were equal in that both were afraid of what unanswerable and unimaginable riddles might be uncovered in so merciless a light”
― James Baldwin, Another Country

“It was the face of a man, of a tormented man. Yet, in precisely the way that great music depends, ultimately, on great silence, this masculinity was defined, and made powerful, by something which was not masculine. But it was not feminine, either, and something in Vivaldo resisted the word androgynous. It was a quality to which great numbers of people would respond without not knowing to what it was they were responding. There was great force in the face, and great gentleness. But, as most women are not gentle, nor most men strong, it was a face which suggested, resonantly, in the depths, the truth about our natures.”
― James Baldwin, Another Country