One can give nothing whatever without giving oneself – that is to say, risking oneself.
Women are like water. They are tempting like that, and they can be that treacherous, and they can seem to be that bottomless, you know? – and that shallow.
But the fact that I had said it as he held my hand made it sound to me unutterably helpless and soft and coy.
The question of color was but another detail, somewhere between being six feet tall and being six feet under.
I was in a box for I could see that, no matter how I turned, the hour of confession was upon me and could scarcely be averted; unless of course, I leaped out of the cab, which would be the most terrible confession of all.
It is an extraordinary achievement to be trapped in the dungeon of color and to dare to shake down its walls and to step out of it, leaving the jailhouse keeper in the rubble.
It is a terrible omen when you see an American flag on somebody else’s car and realize that’s your enemy.
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.
But above all – and this cannot be stressed strongly enough – meaning was always utmost. Despite a highly evolved aesthetic sensibility, despite a punishingly high level of artistic standards, Baldwin’s goal was always to communicate, not to show off.
I had discovered, through ugly experience, what they were like when they held the power and what they were like when you held the power.
That summer, in any case, all the fears with which I had grown up, and which were now a part of me and controlled my vision of the world, rose up like a wall between the world and me, and drove me into the church.
Close up, you see the person’s wrinkles, warts, and pimples; when close to you, the person has innumerable ways of driving you up the wall: but when far from you, these very same imperfections become irreplaceable and beautiful, testifying, after all, to how much each cared about the other. Close up, the person’s imperfections matter, but from far away, you see your own. The questions then is not How did I stand her? but How did she stand me?
When two people have so much to say to each other that there’s almost nothing they can say, and they just stare at each other. But that’s saying something, too.
And I felt myself flow toward him, as a river rushes when the ice breaks up.
A child is too self-centered to relate to any dilemma that does not, somehow relate to him.
It is louder than an untrained orchestra in rehearsal and the sound of infants and children is the theme: tremendously developed, in extraordinary harmonies, in the voices of the elders.
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.
I was introduced, they greeted me with a genuine cordiality and respect – and the respect increased my fright, for it meant that they expected something of me, that I knew in my heart, for their sakes, I could not give – and we sat down.
It’s astounding the first time you realize that a stranger has a body – the realization that he has a body makes him a stranger. It means that you have a body, too.
You will live with this forever, and it will spell out the language of your life.