James Baldwin Love
🔞 ALL INFORMATION CLICK HERE 👈🏻👈🏻👈🏻
James Baldwin Love
Archives
browse by subject culture books art psychology philosophy science history design illustration children's books all subjects
surprise me
Each month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian ( formerly Brain Pickings ) going. For fifteen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor has made your own life more livable in the past year (or the past decade), please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference.
You can also become a spontaneous supporter with a one-time donation in any amount:
Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7
Need to cancel a recurring donation? Go here .
The Marginalian has a free Sunday digest of the week's most mind-broadening and heart-lifting reflections spanning art, science, poetry, philosophy, and other tendrils of our search for truth, beauty, meaning, and creative vitality. Here's an example . Like? Claim yours:
Also: Because The Marginalian is well into its second decade and because I write primarily about ideas of timeless nourishment, each Wednesday I dive into the archive and resurface from among the thousands of essays one worth resavoring. Subscribe to this free midweek pick-me-up for heart, mind, and spirit below — it is separate from the standard Sunday digest of new pieces:
We, none of us, choose the century we are born in, or the skin we are born in, or the chromosomes we are born with. We don’t choose the incredibly narrow band of homeostasis within which we can be alive at all — in bodies that die when their temperature rises above 40 degrees Celsius or drops below 20, living on a planet that would be the volcanic inferno of Venus or the frigid desert of Mars if it were just a little closer to or farther from its star.
And yet, within these narrow parameters of being, nothing appeals to us more than the notion of freedom — the feeling that we are free, that intoxicating illusion with which we blunt the hard fact that we are not . The more abstract and ideological the realm, the more vehemently we can insist that moral choice in specific situations within narrow parameters proves a totality of freedom. But the closer the question moves to the core of our being, the more clearly and catastrophically the illusion crumbles — nowhere more helplessly than in the most intimate realm of experience: love. Try to will yourself into — or out of — loving someone, try to will someone into loving you, and you collide with the fundamental fact that we do not choose whom we love. We could not choose, because we do not choose who and what we are, and in any love that is truly love, we love with everything we are.
James Baldwin (August 2, 1924–December 1, 1987) was a young man — young and brilliant and aflame with life, blazing against society’s illusion of stability and control — when he composed his stunning semi-autobiographical novel Giovanni’s Room ( public library ), making the paradox of freedom its animating theme.
Nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.
To bear the unbearable, Baldwin intimates, we construct and cling to artificial structures of choice, personal and social — habits, routines, the contractual commitment of marriage, the moralistic frameworks that indict one kind of love as good and another as bad. Today, Giovanni’s Room is celebrated as a pioneering liberation and representation of LGBTQ+ love — a term that did not exist in Baldwin’s day, for it speaks to a cultural silence so deep then that there was no adequate language for it. (The language we use today is hardly adequate — but language is always a placeholder for a culture’s evolving understanding of itself, the space in which we work out our concepts as we learn how to think about them in learning how to speak of them.) Baldwin rose against a tidal force of cowardice from publishers at a time when the Bible of psychiatry — the Diagnostic Manual of Mental Disorders — classified love as so many of us know it as a “sociopathic personality disturbance.” At the center of his act of courage and resistance is the recognition that the experience of love is our most primal confrontation with the illusion of freedom.
Exactly half a century after the Spanish-American poet, philosopher, and novelist George Santayana considered why we like what we like and a decade after the Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl made his hard-earned case for saying yes to life in the most unfree of circumstances , Baldwin writes:
People can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.
Four years later, Baldwin would develop these ideas in his immensely insightful speech-turned-essay on freedom and how we imprison ourselves .
In the final years of his life, he would look back on the crucible of these ideas, describing Giovanni’s Room as a book not about one kind of love or another but “about what happens to you if you’re afraid to love anybody.” In his most intimate interview , he would recount the best advice he ever received on the transcendent, terrifying choicelessness of love and the implicit, seemingly paradoxical demand for choice within it — advice given him by an old friend:
You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live some other life, you won’t live any life at all.
Each month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian ( formerly Brain Pickings ) going. For fifteen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor has made your own life more livable in the past year (or the past decade), please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference.
You can also become a spontaneous supporter with a one-time donation in any amount:
Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7
Need to cancel an existing donation? (It's okay — life changes course. I treasure your kindness and appreciate your
support for as long as it lasted.) You can do so on this page .
The Marginalian has a free Sunday digest of the week's most mind-broadening and heart-lifting reflections spanning art, science, poetry, philosophy, and other tendrils of our search for truth, beauty, meaning, and creative vitality. Here's an example . Like? Claim yours:
Also: Because The Marginalian is well into its second decade and because I write primarily about ideas of timeless nourishment, each Wednesday I dive into the archive and resurface from among the thousands of essays one worth resavoring. Subscribe to this free midweek pick-me-up for heart, mind, and spirit below — it is separate from the standard Sunday digest of new pieces:
—
Published June 6, 2021
—
https://www.themarginalian.org/2021/06/06/james-baldwin-giovannis-room-love-choice/
—
The Marginalian participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn commissions by linking to Amazon. In more human terms, this means that whenever you buy a book on Amazon from any link on here, I receive a small percentage of its price, which goes straight back into my own colossal biblioexpenses. Privacy policy . (TLDR: You're safe — there are no nefarious "third parties" lurking on my watch or shedding crumbs of the "cookies" the rest of the internet uses.)
In many walks of life, a conscience is a more expensive encumbrance than a wife or a carriage.
Our motto is: Don't quote it if you can't source it.
Social Media
Facebook
Instagram
Twitter
Pinterest
NOAM CHOMSKY: “I GET FANTASTIC MEDICAL CARE BECAUSE I’M RICH”
Diplomatic immunity and the date that will live in infamy
Podcasting “Against The Great Forces of History”
Per la vittoria della nazione oppressa dell’Ucraina contro l’invasione! (Declaration)
Corner Crossing: How 1.6 Million Acres of Public Land is Inaccessible
Epoch claims to have correspondents in 60 countries and territories, newspapers in 12 languages and…
Is Self-Deception the Bedrock of All Knowledge?
Two Moral Views of Other People: Buber and Levinas
Superstition, Custom, and What People Say: Bacon’s “Of Custom and Education”
James Baldwin is often remembered as a political radical. He definitely was, but like Cornel West , Baldwin’s social and political views were informed by the idea that love transforms us. The above quote is from Baldwin’s 1963 book, The Fire Next Time , which he wrote for the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation. In The Fire Next Time, Baldwin writes a deeply personal, defiant, but thoughtful manifesto about the struggle against racism in…
Philosophy is a way of life and the unphilosophical life in not worth living.
Philosophy professor reaching beyond the ivory tower and digging deeper. elmhurst.academia.edu/DouglasGiles , @DGilesPhd, InsertPhilosophyHere.com .
Quotes are added by the Goodreads community and are not verified by Goodreads.
(Learn more)
“Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.”
―
James A. Baldwin
To see what your friends thought of this quote, please sign up!
Eda
67 books
view quotes
Ashley Gutherie
1,355 books
view quotes
Romanus
88 books
view quotes
Al
2,178 books
view quotes
A.
3,495 books
view quotes
Arielle
97 books
view quotes
Emira
430 books
view quotes
Claire
132 books
view quotes
Châu
506 books
view quotes
Maria
5,760 books
view quotes
Zaria
2 books
view quotes
Mrieann
403 books
view quotes
AFL
37 books
view quotes
KC
1,419 books
view quotes
Claire
1,891 books
view quotes
Taylor
303 books
view quotes
Dolores
40 books
view quotes
Suzanne
3,708 books
view quotes
Chris
202 books
view quotes
Isabelle
104 books
view quotes
Cian
156 books
view quotes
Kimmy
1 book
view quotes
Wanjiru
143 books
view quotes
Jenn
6,758 books
view quotes
Jimmy
31 books
view quotes
Jnj
188 books
view quotes
Edith
293 books
view quotes
mylonitsa
51 books
view quotes
Shay
380 books
view quotes
Krys
1,392 books
view quotes
Antonine
6 books
view quotes
Musings on Living
2,960 books
view quotes
Gochrisgo
782 books
view quotes
Allie
418 books
view quotes
Cam
71 books
view quotes
Justino
109 books
view quotes
serena ♡
1,341 books
view quotes
A.D.
1,396 books
view quotes
Stickball Enthusiast
987 books
view quotes
Jodi-Ann
179 books
view quotes
Andreia
412 books
view quotes
Beatriz
0 books
view quotes
luz
184 books
view quotes
Erin
2,924 books
view quotes
Veronika
378 books
view quotes
Miki
192 books
view quotes
Adam
1,694 books
view quotes
Berke
14 books
view quotes
Matheus
104 books
view quotes
Ellen X.
2,646 books
view quotes
Joey
4 books
view quotes
Searnold
531 books
view quotes
Jeromar
123 books
view quotes
Kat
71 books
view quotes
Mallory
1,626 books
view quotes
Bonnie
224 books
view quotes
Liane
0 books
view quotes
Noora
197 books
view quotes
Yolanda
1,395 books
view quotes
Travis
0 books
view quotes
Eliana
21 books
view quotes
sebastian
303 books
view quotes
Charlotte
11 books
view quotes
Seda
2,391 books
view quotes
Yumi
64 books
view quotes
Adnaan
55 books
view quotes
Michael
208 books
view quotes
Kerry
5 books
view quotes
Sofia
185 books
view quotes
Hetvi
238 books
view quotes
Arina
443 books
view quotes
Nico
2,313 books
view quotes
Lynne
111 books
view quotes
Clara
149 books
view quotes
R.
873 books
view quotes
Shankar
1,443 books
view quotes
Billy
14 books
view quotes
Rachel
231 books
view quotes
Krasimira
410 books
view quotes
Alexandra
330 books
view quotes
Sara
328 books
view quotes
Hannah
304 books
view quotes
Martha
83 books
view quotes
books2kel
456 books
view quotes
Dannia
176 books
view quotes
Tehmina
65 books
view quotes
Enrico
467 books
view quotes
Ayuni
227 books
view quotes
« previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 … 52 53 next »
All Quotes
My Quotes
Add A Quote
Company
About us
Careers
Terms
Privacy
Interest Based Ads
Ad Preferences
Help
Work with us
Authors
Advertise
Authors & ads blog
API
Welcome back. Just a moment while we sign you in to your Goodreads account.
Milf Farmer
Pussy Juice Running
Lactating On Cock