Quotes from James McBride

Booze, he thought. I chose booze over my Moonflower.

He didn't look mad, but he didn't look like Martin Luther King neither.

Deacon Cuffy Lambkins of Five Ends Baptist Church became a walking dead man on a cloudy September afternoon in 1969.

I been around the sun one hundred four whole times and nobody's explained nothing to me.

the Statue of Liberty, a gigantic copper reminder that this city was a grinding factory that diced the poor man's dreams worse than any cotton gin or sugarcane field from the old country.

didn't matter to him whether it was really true or not. He just changed the truth till it fit him. He was a real white man.

My siblings and I spent hours playing tricks and teasing one another. It was our way of dealing with realities over which we had no control.

She wore a flowered blue dress of the type whores naturally favored, and that thing was so tight that when she moved, the daisies got all mixed up with the azaleas. She walked like a warm room full of smoke.

Papi, olvidaste lo que le hiciste a ese demonio Deems? Su banda de lagartos te va a rebanar como un plátano.

kneydlach, gefilte fish, kugl, chopped liver, and

in fact that's what I liked about black folks all my life: They never judged me. My black friends never asked me how much money I made, or what school my children went to, or anything like that. They just said, "Come as you are." Blacks have always been peaceful and trusting.

It's God's world. He washes you clean. He makes you whole. He puts rain in your garden and sunshine in your heart. Clarence

her smile of understanding and acceptance that said, "All intangibles are forgiven, I accept them and more—your faults, your dips and turns, everything, because our love is a hammer forged at the anvil of God and not even your most foolish, irrational act can break it." That look.

Everybody got God on their side in war. Problem is, God ain't tellin' nobody who He's for.

We'll be colored when the day's done, no matter how the cut comes or goes.

You mean the nice little white man who sings? With the puppets?" "That's Mister Rogers's address. One forty-three. You know what one forty-three means?" "No, Soup." His stoic face folded into a smile. "I would tell you, but I don't wanna spoil it.

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.

here he dug in his pockets and produced a thimble, a root, two empty tin cans, three Indian arrowheads, an apple peeler, a dried-up boll weevil, and a bent pocketknife.

As he sat before the elderly Irishman in his boxcar, the moment of realization suddenly tumbled into Elefante's consciousness with startling efficiency, landing on his insides with a heaviness that felt like a blacksmith's hammer falling on an anvil.

Fact is, I never knowed a Negro from that day to this but who couldn't lie to themselves about their own evil while pointing out the white man's wrong, and I weren't no exception.

Them fellers was dangerous, but for the simple reason they had a cause. Ain't no worse thing in the world than fronting up against one of those, for a man with a cause, right or wrong, has got plenty to prove, and will make you suck sorrow if you get in the way of 'em wrongly.

Like most of the Jews in Suffolk they treated me very kindly, truly warm and welcoming, as if I were one of them which in an odd way I suppose I was. I found it odd and amazing when white people treated me that way, as if there were no barriers between us. It said a lot about this religion—Judaism—that some of its followers, old southern crackers who talked with southern twangs and wore straw hats, seemed to believe that its covenants went beyond the color of one's skin.

The enemy was irony and truth and hypocrisy, that was the real enemy. That was the enemy that was killing him.

was. The constant learning and