“Thirty [years old]. And I was alone, had been for a while, and might be for a while, but it no longer frightened me the way it had. I was discovering something terrifyingly simple: there is absolutely nothing I could do about it. I was discovering this in the way, I suppose, that everybody does, but having tried, endlessly, to do something about it. You attach yourself to someone, or you allow someone to attach themselves to you. This person is not for you, and you, really, are not for that person - and that’s it, son. But you try, you both try. The only result of all your trying is to make absolutely real the unconquerable distance between you: to dramatize, in a million ways, the absolutely unalterable truth of this distance. Side by side, and hand in hand, your sunsets, nevertheless, are not occurring in the same universe. It is not merely that the rain falls differently on each of you, for that can be a wonder and a joy: it is that what is rain for the one is not rain for the other.”
— James Baldwin in Just Above My Head
(the absolute best crystallization of his writing…ever.)
“I had never seen Fonny outside of the world in which
I moved. I had seen him with his father and his mother
and his sisters, and I had seen him with us. But I’m not
sure, now that I think about it, that I had ever really seen
him with me: not until this moment when we were leaving
the restaurant and all the waiters were laughing and talk-
ing with him, in Spanish and in English, and Fonny’s face
opened in a way I’d never seen it open and that laugh of
his came rumbling up from his balls, from their balls—
I had certainly never seen him, anyway, in the world in
which he moved. Perhaps it was only now that I saw him
with me, for he was turned away from me, laughing, but he
was holding on to my hand. He was a stranger to me, but
joined. I had never seen him with other men, I had never
seen the love and respect that men can have for each other.”
- Clementine “Tish” River
If Beale Street Could Talk
p. 58
“Because you love one human being, you see everyone else very differently than you saw them before—perhaps I only mean to say that you begin to see—and you are both stronger and more vulnerable, both free and bound. Free, paradoxically, because now, you have a home—your lover’s arms. And bound: to that mystery, precisely, a bondage which liberates you into something of the glory and suffering of the world.”
No Name In The Street
‘Take Me To The Water’ p. 23
James Baldwin
David Leeming
James Baldwin
A Biography by David Leeming
p. 325
on James Baldwin & If Beale Street Could Talk
(via allthingsjamesbaldwin)
