Quotes from James McBride

how long could I go on before she'd find out who I was? She'd know it before long. Besides, how can somebody love you if you don't know who you is?

a monstrous bastion of arrogant elegance

It sat proudly atop the hill behind wrought-iron gates, with smooth lawns, tennis courts, and shiny classroom buildings, a monstrous bastion of arrogant elegance, glowing like a phoenix above the ramshackle neighborhood of Chicken Hill.

There was something about him that glistened, something warm that churned and billowed about, like a smoke cloud filled with sparklers.

It made me a bit sad, truth be to tell it, to watch them hundreds of white folks crying for the Negro, for there weren't hardly ever any Negroes present at most of them gatherings, and them that was there was doodied up and quiet as a mouse. It seemed to me the whole business of the Negro's life out there weren't no different than it was out west, to my mind. It was like a big, long lynching. Everybody got to make a speech about the Negro but the Negro.

He leaned on the church wall and gave his heart a moment to catch itself.

you're still breathing. Every day is a new world.

She never spoke about Jewish people as white. She spoke about them as Jews, which made them somehow different.

You hold the copper coin under your tongue during . . . coitus . . . to keep from getting pregnant. My first wife was from Tennessee.

It occurred to me then that you is everything you are in this life at every moment. And that includes loving somebody. If you can't be your own self, how can you love somebody? How can you be free?

Well, I reckon to really understand the world, you got to die at least once.

Most cars drove through there because the drivers is either from The Bottom and wanna get home - or they ain't from The Bottom and wanna get home in one piece.

her heart grew tiny wings again.

Why she got to be bowlegged?" "I do got standards.

writer or a musician, not knowing that it was possible

He was apparently a small man, according to Mr. Higgins, "with girly features, curly hair . . . and the heart of a rascal.

FOR MA AND JADE, WHO LOVED A GOOD WHOPPER

I'm sure they all walk around holding hands up there," Irv said.

He had gotten a new set of clothes someplace, but they were only worse new versions of the same thing he wore before: black trousers, black vest, frock coat, stiff collar, withered, crumpled, and chewed at the edges. His boots was worse than ever, crumpled like pieces of text paper, curled at the toes. In other words, he looked normal, like his clothes was dying of thirst, and he himself was about to keel over out of plain ugliness.

The Old Man came to that meeting disguised as a fisherman, wearing an oilskin jacket and a fisherman's hat. I don't know why. No disguise would'a worked by then, for he was red hot. His white beard and hard stare was plastered on every wanted poster from Pittsburgh to Alabama.

See, dance changes people. Dancing makes you free. It makes people happy.

Being a Negro means showing your best face to the white man every day. You know his wants, his needs, and watch him proper. But he don't know your wants. He don't know your needs or feelings or what's inside you, for you ain't equal to him in no measure. You just a nigger to him. A thing: like a dog or a shovel or a horse.

It doesn't matter. They're all dead now, or in Florida," which in her mind is the same as being dead. "I'll never retire to Florida," she vowed. Riding past a graveyard one day, she looked over and remarked, "That's Florida Forever.

Annie's Pa was a hero to me. It was him who held the weight of the thing, had the weight of my people on his shoulders. It was him who left house and home behind for something he believed in.