Quotes from James McBride

I'm Osawatomie John Brown of Kansas," he declared. He liked to use his full Indian name when he was warring. "And I come to free the Negro people.

The plain truth is that you'd have an easier time standing in the middle of the Mississippi River and requesting that it flow backward than to expect people of different races and backgrounds to stop loving each other, stop marrying each other, stop starting families, stop enjoying the dreams that love inspires. Love is unstoppable. It is our greatest weapon, a natural force, created by God.

You can play one part in life, but you can't be that thing. You just playing it. You're not real.

If I ever see you again, I'll send your ass hooting and hollering out my damn door.

I was in a quandary, and my tears busted forth again, which worked out perfect, for it moved them all to my favor, and I seen right off that crying and squalling was part of the game of being a girl.

It was in her sense of education, more than any other, that Mommy conveyed her Jewishness to us. She admired the way Jewish parents raised their children to be scholastic standouts, insulating them from a potentially harmful and dangerous public school system by clustering together within certain communities, to attend certain schools, to be taught by certain teachers who enforced discipline and encouraged learning, and she followed their lead.

His band was revolutionary—it was made up of outstanding players and vocalists, among the best in popular music this nation has ever produced.

He buried money in distant hotel rooms, carried tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, around in a suitcase; he kept wads of cashier's checks in his wallet. He always had a back door, a quick exit, a way of getting out, because behind the boarded-up windows of his life, the Godfather's fear of having nothing was overwhelming in its ability to swallow him whole and send him into a series of wild behaviors.

Now he was as lost as the rest of us, and didn't know his way out of the particular patch of woods and that homestead any more than a bird knows his way out of a privy with the door closed, but he was the leader, and he had found what he wanted.

God is the color of water. Water doesn't have a color.

Truth is, lying come natural to all Negroes during slave time, for no man or woman in bondage ever prospered stating their true thoughts to the boss.

And you say to yourself, They will remember him. He will make them remember him. He's hollering from the back of the bus of history, just so they'll know who he is. So Vanessa will know him. And Cecil. And Maddy. And Laura. And Helen. And even little Ni Ni and the twins Malcolm and Malik. And in knowing who he is, maybe they will one day know who they are.

Slavery done made a fool out of a lot of folks. Twisted 'em all different kinds of ways. I seen it happen many a time in my day. I expect it'll happen in all our tomorrows, too, for when you slave a person, you slave the one in front and the one behind.

It took years before I began to accept the fact that the nebulous "white man's world" wasn't as free as it looked; that class, luck, religion all factored in as well; that many white individuals' problems surpassed my own, often by a lot; that all Jews are not like my grandfather and that part of me is Jewish too. Yet the color boundary in my mind was and still is the greatest hurdle. In order to clear it, my solution was to stay away from it and fly solo.

Chona had smelled not a hot dog but the future, a future in which devices that fit in one's pocket and went zip, zap, and zilch delivered a danger far more seductive and powerful than any hot dog, a device that children of the future would clamor for and become addicted to, a device that fed them their oppression disguised as free thought.

But then, she thought, every once in a while there's a glimmer of hope. Just a blip on the horizon, a whack on the nose of the giant that set him back on his heels or to the canvas, something that said, Guess what, you so-and-so, I am God's child. And I. Am. Still. Here.

The sight of her lovely brown face breaking into laughter and focusing tightly on him, as she stood in the dress of azaleas in the sunlight yard of weeds, made him feel light again. In that moment he realized that all the experience of thirty-two years on the NYPD and all the formal police training in the world was useless when the smile of someone you suddenly care about finds the bow that wraps your heart and undoes it.

Am I black or white?" "You're a human being," she snapped. "Educate yourself or you'll be a nobody!" "Will I be a black nobody or just a nobody?" "If you're a nobody," she said dryly, "it doesn't matter what color you are.

See, a marriage needs love. And God. And a little money. That's all. The rest you can deal with. It's not about black or white. It's about God and don't let anyone tell you different. All this Jungle fever! Shoot! The Jungle fever goes away, honey, and then what are you gonna do?

There is an eternity behind and an eternity before, Onion. That little speck at the center, however long, is life. And that is but comparatively a minute, he said. I has done what the Lord has asked me to do in the little time I had. That was my purpose. To hive the colored.

She looked at me a long time, watching me sweep the floor, wearing that damn fool dress. I didn't say a word. Just kept on sweeping. Finally, she placed her small foot on the broom and stopped it. I had to look up at her then. Them eyes was staring down at me. I can't say they was kind eyes. Rather they was tight as balled fists. Full. Firm. Stirred. The wind seemed to live in that woman's face. Looking at her was like staring at a hurricane.

I hate to sound blase about it, but literary status is not important to me. Being happy is important to me.

Being a best-selling author doesn't make you a millionaire. It's not like Stephen King.

I'm proud of 'Miracle at St. Anna' and I loved it; there's no question in my mind it's as good as any movie that came out in 2007.