‘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.’

He grasped me by the collar, wrestling and caressing at once, fluid and iron at once: saliva spraying from his lips and his eyes full of tears, but with the bones of his face showing and the muscles leaping in his arms and neck. ‘You want to leave Giovanni because he makes you stink. You want to despise Giovanni because he is not afraid of the stin

I kept kissing her and holding her, trying to find my way in her again, as though she were a familiar, darkened room in which I fumbled to find the light. And, with my kisses, I was trying also to delay the moment which would commit me to her, or fail to commit me to her. But I think she felt that the indefinitive constraint between us was of her d

‘Didn’t you like Spain,’ I asked, nervously, ‘at all?’ She ran one hand, impatiently, through her hair. ‘Oh. Of course, I like Spain, why not? It’s very beautiful. I just didn’t know what I was doing there. And I’m beginning to be tired of being in places for no particular reason.’

I told myself that we both had always known, Giovanni and myself, that our idyll could not last forever. And it was not as though I had not been honest with him—he knew all about Hella. He knew that she would be returning to Paris one day. Now she would be coming back and my life with Giovanni would be finished. It would be something that had happe

Some years later, in a reply to an interviewer’s question, James Baldwin made plain his feelings about the connectivity between race and sexuality: ‘The sexual question and the racial question have always been entwined, you know. If Americans can mature on the level of racism, then they have to mature on the level of sexuality.’

I wanted a woman to be for me a steady ground, like the earth itself, where I could always be renewed. It had been so once; it had almost been so once. I could make it so again, I could make it real. It only demanded a short, hard strength for me to become myself again.

between an old man who looked like a receptacle of all the world’s dirt and disease and a young boy, a redhead, who would look like that man one day, if one could read, in the dullness of his eye, anything so real as a future.

Not all my memorizing had prepared me for the metamorphosis which my memorizing had helped to bring about.