James Baldwin quotes about desire

Love him, love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?

You want to leave Giovanni because he makes you stink. You want to despise Giovanni because he is not afraid of the stink of love. You want to kill him in the name of all your lying little moralities.

With everything in me screaming No! yet the sum of me sighed Yes.

And these nights were being acted out under a foreign sky, with no-one to watch, no penalties attached—it was this last fact which was our undoing, for nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.

You play it safe long enough, and you’ll end up trapped in your own dirty body, forever and forever and forever—like me.

With this fearful intimation there opened in me a hatred for Giovanni which was as powerful as my love and which was nourished by the same roots.

And I felt myself flow toward him, as a river rushes when the ice breaks up.

You are the one who keeps talking about what I want. But I have only been talking about who I want.

If you cannot love me, I will die. Before you came I wanted to die, I have told you many times. It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody.

You love your purity, you love your mirror—you are just like a little virgin, you walk around with your hands in front of you as though you had some precious metal, gold, silver, rubies, maybe diamonds down there between your legs!

What kind of life can we have in this room?—this filthy little room. What kind of life can two men have together, anyway?

Giovanni looked at me. And this look made me feel that no one in my life had ever looked at me directly before.

It was like holding in my hand some rare, exhausted, nearly doomed bird which I had miraculously happened to find.

I was glad. I was utterly, hopelessly, horribly glad. I knew I could do nothing whatever to stop the ferocious excitement which had burst in me like a storm.

This old whore, Paris, as she turns in bed, is very moving.

It’s like putting an electric plug in a dead socket. Touch, but no contact. All touch, but no contact and no light.

He held my face between his hands and I suppose such tenderness has scarcely ever produced such terror as I then felt.

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.

To remember it so clearly, so painfully tonight tells me that I have never for an instant truly forgotten it.

Even at my most candid, even when I tried hardest to give myself to him as he gave himself to me, I was holding something back.

The need to act was like a fever in me, the only act possible was the act of love.

Then something opened in my brain, a secret, noiseless door swung open, frightening me: it had not occurred to me until that instant that, in fleeing from his body, I confirmed and perpetuated his body’s power over me.

I wanted a woman to be for me a steady ground, like the earth itself, where I could always be renewed.

I remember that life in that room seemed to be occurring beneath the sea, time flowed past indifferently above us, hours and days had no meaning. In the beginning our life together held a joy and amazement which was newborn every day.

I hoped to burn out, through Hella, my image of Giovanni and the reality of his touch—I hoped to drive out fire with fire.