Quotes from Marlon James

One night. It took one night to lose everything. But maybe everything was nothing if it could be lost so fast.

Every time you open this you get free. Freeness up in here and nobody even have to know you get free but you.

Maybe I should have grabbed my own cock skin and smashed it off with a rock.

People would say that if the Rum Preacher was all that stood between Heaven and Hell, then everybody had better stock up on asbestos.

When dog kill puss, and puss kill dog, the only one happy is the john-crow. And the john-crow been waiting for this all it life. The vulture with him red head and white feather chest and black wings.

You, inquisitor, are a man who collects words. You collect mine.

I goin' call her Lilith. You can call her what they call her.

Dust hid blood, but not remembrance.

knowledge of some sort of sick white science

Word is divine wish, they say. Word is invisible to all but the gods. So when woman or man write words, they dare to look at the divine.

What is evil anyway, a sad soul infected with devils who take his will, or a man thinking that of all his mother's children he loves himself the best?

Lilith have a quilt on her back, but there be a bigger quilt, a patchwork of negro bones that reach from the Africa to the West Indies.

For the age of the voice is over and we in the age of the written mark. The word on stone, the word on parchment, the word on cloth, the word that is even greater than the glyph, for the word provoke a sound in the mouth.

You think this is about setting aright what is askew, disorder back into order. That is the shit men think, to make any wicked action right in their eyes.

He was spiraling downward and would have taken the village with him were it not for the other, who lead them instead to a light blacker than the thickest darkness.

Because at the end of a true story, there is nothing but waste.

Know something too late? Well, is better you never know, as my mother used to say. Worse, you all present tense and have to deal with sudden past tense all around you. It's like realizing somebody rob you a year late.

Stop talking about truth - I fed you truth all along, but as I said before, what you want is story.

Not that I even cared for company. Certainly not these people. But I spend most of my days alone, and my nights with people I never wish to see in the morning. I will admit, at least to my darkest soul, that there was nothing worse to be than in the middle of many souls, even souls you might know, and still be lonely. I have spoken of this before. Men I have met and women too, surrounded by what they think is love and yet are the loneliest in all the ten and three worlds.

They never grow less stupid, men who believe in belief.

He was the only one doing the eating, so she must have been doing the watching. Women loved to watch men eat, he thought. It was the last blast of primal energy that the hunter-gatherer had left to show.

What you looking at is the only way I don't feel like being me is labor, like I holding myself together all the time.

I admire that a woman can do people like a man. You just get up one day and gone. No drums, no pigeons, no note, no word, no nothing.

We were women together