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Book: Giovanni's Room
Quotes of Book: Giovanni's Room

James Baldwin _ Giovanni's Room
The beast which Giovanni had awakened in me would never go to sleep again; but one day I would not be with Giovanni any more. And would I then, like all the others, find myself turning and following all kinds of boys down God knows what dark avenues, into what dark places? With this fearful intimation there opened in me hatred for Giovanni which was as powerful as my love and which was nourished by the same roots.
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James Baldwin _ Giovanni's Room
But 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. I
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James Baldwin _ Giovanni's Room
People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare. Jacques
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James Baldwin _ Giovanni's Room
If dirty words frighten you," said Giovanni, "I really do not know how you have managed to live so long. People are full of dirty words. The only time they do not use them, most people I mean, is when they are describing something dirty.
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James Baldwin _ Giovanni's Room
Somebody," said Jacques, "your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour-and in the oddest places!-for the lack of it.
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James Baldwin _ Giovanni's Room
Tell me,' he said, 'what is this thing about time? Why is it better to be late than early? People are always saying, we must wait, we must wait. What are they waiting for?"
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James Baldwin _ Giovanni's Room
Perhaps he is a fool and a coward but almost everybody is one or the other and most people are both.
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James Baldwin _ Giovanni's Room
My father's attitude was that this was but an inevitable phase of my growing up and he affected to take it lightly. But beneath his jocular, boys-together air, he was at a loss, he was frightened. Perhaps he had supposed that my growing up would bring us closer together- whereas, now that he was trying to find out something about me, I was in full flight from him. I did not want him to know me. I did not want anyone to know me. And then, again, I was undergoing with my father what the very young inevitably undergo with their elders: I was beginning to judge him. And the very harshness of this judgment, which broke my heart, revealed, though I could not have said it then, how much I had loved him, how that love, along with my innocence, was dying.
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James Baldwin _ Giovanni's Room
I suppose this is why I asked her to marry me: to give me something to be moored to. Perhaps this was why, in Spain, she decided that she wanted to marry me. But 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.
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James Baldwin _ Giovanni's Room
Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself... I think now that if I had had any intimation that the self I was going to find would turn out to be only the same self from which I had spent so much time in flight, I would have stayed at home.
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James Baldwin _ Giovanni's Room
There is something fantastic in the spectacle I now present to myself of having run so far, so hard, across the ocean even, only to find myself brought up short once more before the bulldog in my own backyard - the yard, in the meantime, having grown smaller and the bulldog bigger.
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James Baldwin _ Giovanni's Room
The train will be the same, the people, struggling for comfort and, even, dignity on the straight-backed, wooden, third-class seats will be the same, and I will be the same.
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