Giovanni S Room Quotes

“And with every step I took it became more impossible for me to turn back. And my mind was empty—or it was as though my mind had become one enormous, anaesthetized wound. I thought only, One day I'll weep for this. One of these days I'll start to cry.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“Giovanni had awakened an itch, had released a gnaw in me. I realized it one afternoon, when I was taking him to work via the Boulevard Montparnasse. We had bought a kilo of cherries and we were eating them as we walked along. We were both insufferably childish and high-spirited that afternoon and the spectacle we presented, two grown men jostling each other on the wide sidewalk and aiming the cherry pits, as though they were spitballs, into each other's faces, must have been outrageous. And I realized that such childishness was fantastic at my age and the happiness out of which it sprang yet more so; for that moment I really loved Giovanni, who had never seemed more beautiful than he was that afternoon.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“He smiled, "Why, 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." He played with my thumb and grinned. "N'est-ce pas?"

"Beautiful logic," I said. "You mean I have a home to go to as long as I don't go there?"

He laughed. "Well, isn't it true? You don't have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“I loved her as much as ever and I still did not know how much that was.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“Much has been written of love turning to hatred, of the heart growing cold with the death of love. It is a remarkable process. It is far more terrible than anything I have ever read about it, more terrible than anything I will ever be able to say.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“No matter how it seems now, I must confess: I loved him. I do not think that I will ever love anyone like that again. And this might be a great relief if I did not also know that, when the knife has fallen, Giovanni, if he feels anything will feel relief.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“But I felt that it was my heart which was broken. Something had broken in me to make me so cold and so perfectly still and far away.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“Maybe everything bad that happens to you makes you weaker," said Giovanni, as though he had not heard me, "and so you can stand less and less.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“The morning weighs on my shoulders with the dreadful weight of hope and I take the blue envelope which Jacques has sent me and tear it slowly into many pieces, watching them dance in the wind, watching the wind carry them away. Yet, as I turn and begin walking toward the waiting people, the wind blows some of them back on me.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“I had to get out of there for my face showed too much, the war in my body was dragging me down. My feet refused to carry me over to him again. The wind of my life was blowing me away.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“He was waiting, I think, for me to cross that space and take him in my arms again—waiting, as one waits at a deathbed for the miracle one dare not disbelieve, which will not happen.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“One of these days," he said. "Everything bad will happen—one of these days.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“The Americans have no sense of doom, none whatever. They do not recognize doom when they see it.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“I feel in myself now a faint, a dreadful stirring of what so overwhelmingly stirred in me then, great thirsty heat, and trembling, and tenderness so painful I thought my heart would burst. But out of this astounding, intolerable pain came joy; we gave each other joy that night.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“I stared at absurd Paris, which was as cluttered now, under the scalding sun, as the landscape of my heart.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“I do not know what I would do if you left me." For the first time I felt the suggestion of a threat in his voice—or I put it there. "I have been alone so long—I do not think I would be able to live if I had to be alone again.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“On each piece of paper I found addresses, telephone numbers, memos of various rendezvous made and kept—or perhaps not kept—people met and remembered, or perhaps not remembered, hopes probably not fulfilled: certainly not fulfilled, or I would not have been standing on that street corner.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“To begin with, the room was not large enough for two. It looked out on a small courtyard. 'Looked out' means only that the room had two windows, against which the courtyard malevolently pressed, encroaching day by day, as though it had confused itself with a jungle.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“But she saw nothing in my eyes—she stared at me as though I had made a long journey on a white charger all the way to her prison house.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“I do not think you have ever lied to me but I know that you have never told me the truth—why?”
― James Baldwin

“He was sobbing, it would have been said, as though his heart would break.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“I remember life in that room seemed to be occurring beneath the sea. Time flowed past indifferently above us; hours and days had no meaning.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room