Quotes from James McBride

It occurred to me then that you is everything you are in this life at every moment.

I asked her who he was and she said, "He was a man ahead of his time." She actually liked Malcolm X. She put him in nearly the same category as her other civil rights heroes, Paul Robeson, Jackie Robinson, Eleanor Roosevelt, A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Kennedys—any Kennedy. When Malcolm X talked about "the white devil" Mommy simply felt those references didn't apply to her.

but all your 'sorrys' are gone when a person dies... That's why you have to say all your 'sorrys' and 'I love yous' while a person is living, because tomorrow isn't promised.

Just because you toast marshmallows with a kid on a camping trip doesn't mean he'll become a Boy Scout.

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. I

When society dropped its hammer on your head, well, there it is. Soup

He ain't gonna live long, child. He's crazy. He thinks the n***ers's equal to the white man.

The woman, he thought, was all good handwriting.

But while she weebled and wobbled and leaned, she did not fall. She responded with speed and motion (163).

A body can't prosper if a person don't know who they are. That makes you poor as a pea, not knowing who you are inside. That's worse than being anything in the world on the outside.

when folks wanna believe something, the truth ain't got no place in that compartment.

What hair she had looked like scrambled eggs in string form, in wild clumps and in single strands, giving her the appearance of a wired, harried, ancient, terrified professor.

nothing and then selling it at triple cost to buyers in Wyandanch

The Negro comes in many colors. Dark. Black. Blacker. Blackest. Blacker than night. Black as hell. Black as tar.

As Sausage recounted it in the basement that night, it was as if her own future were being revealed, unrolling itself before her like a carpet, one whose design and weave changed as it stretched out ahead.

the sadness, the suspicion, the weariness, the knowledge that came from living a special misery in a world of misery.

I think he was a gangster." "Why you say that?" Miss Izi asked. "He had a lot of pockmarks on his face." "That's nothing," Miss Izi said. "That could be from learning to use a fork.

Is this what love does? It changes you this way? It allows you to see the past this clearly?

Her smile displayed a raw, natural beauty that caught Potts off guard. The woman, he thought, was all good handwriting.

Giving words to ideas was too dangerous in their world. When Poppa did give words to something, though, it was for a reason. It had weight.

He saw now she was not just handsome, but rather had a quiet, cumulative beauty. She was a tall woman, middle-aged, whose face was not etched with the stern lines of church folks who've seen too much and done little about it other than pray.

She smiled bitterly, and once again the mask she wore so well, the firm lady of strong, impatient indifference whom he'd met when he first walked into the church a week before, broke apart, revealing the vulnerable, lonely soul underneath. She's just like me, he thought in wonder. She's as lost as I am.

Nothing in this world is dangerous unless white folks says it is," she said flatly. "Danger here. Danger there. We don't need you to tell us about danger in these projects. We don't need you to say what the world is to us.

and on it went, the whole business of the white man's reality lumping together like a giant, lopsided snowball, the Great American Myth, the Big Apple, the Big Kahuna, the City That Never Sleeps, while the blacks and Latinos who cleaned the apartments and dragged out the trash and made the music and filled the jails with sorrow slept the sleep of the invisible and functioned as local color.