Quotes from Marlon James

I laugh because me been dancing with shadow in the dawn and in the night. Even in broad, bright daylight we searching for the dark.

I'm not saying he's stingy. But sometimes when you're too careful it just turns into a different kind of carelessness. It's not that either. He's from a generation that never expected to get midway up the ladder so when he got there he was too stunned to dare to climb higher.

This is a story of several killings, of boys who meant nothing to a world still spinning

Homer whiter than plenty white man, it seem. But nothing make a nigger more black than whip scars. Lilith don't want none of it.

Y dijo: ¿sabes por qué me llaman Chistoso? Porque nunca estoy pa bromas.

But he starting to confuse representing people with owning them, and soon even he going need a reckoning.

Police only have to see that me don't have no shoes before he say what the bloodcloth you nasty naiggers doing 'round decent people, and give me two choices.

him swinging the baton and knocking out my side teeth and cracking my temple so that I can never hear good out of that ear again and saying let that be a lesson to never take you dutty, stinking, ghetto self uptown again. And I see them and I wait. But

Racism here is sour and sticky, but it goes down so smooth that you're tempted to be racist with a Jamaican just to see if they would even get it.

Sure good is good, but good is something that nobody know. Good is a ghost. You can't get pocket money from good. Jamaica better off bad, because that type of bad work.

retribution was coming for the stupid, not the smart.

My mother sings One day at a time sweet Jesus, and even Daddy likes to say that, one day at a time, as if it's some strategy for living. And yet the quickest way to not live at all is to take life one day at a time.

They turned over the reception desk and the poor security guards did the only thing they could do. They ran.

The world is fickle about witches.' 'The wold is fickle about women.

anything you want to know about Kingston's green versus orange war, everything you ever need to know about the rudeboy-cum-gunman is not in Bob Marley's lyrics or in Peter Tosh's but in Marty Robbins's "Big Iron." He's

People think it way past the time when anybody can remember who start things first, but don't get the history of the ghetto twist up, decent people. Buntin-Banton and Dishrag start it first. And when PNP win the 1972 election all hell break loose. First

the dead never stop talking and sometimes the living hear.

He will live to see them make him a national hero and he will die the only person thinking he had failed. That's what happens when you personify hopes and dreams in one person.

God. God. God. You know what's God's problem, the man say. I mean, Jehovah, Jesus, Yahweh, Allah, Jah, whatever bullshit you want to call him— —Don't blaspheme against His Imperial Majesty. —But the thing about God, is that he needs the fame, you know? Fine, the attention, the notice, the recognition. He said it himself, in all your ways acknowledge me. If you stop paying attention or call his name out he kinda ceases to exist. —Brethren—

No thought is wise just because you have it, girl.

Listen. Dead people never stop talking. Maybe because death is not death at all, just a detention after school. You know where you're coming from and you're always returning from it. You know where you're going though you never seem to get there and you're just dead. Dead.

Fury is a cloud that leaves my mind empty and my heart black.

It just happens doesn't it, some point where a man just start living all over you.

Shit doesn't just happen in a void, there're ripples and consequences and even with all that there's still a whole fucking world going on, whether you're doing something or not.