Quotes from Marlon James

He's from a generation that never even expected to get midway up the ladder so when he got there he was too stunned to dare climb higher. That's the problem with midway. Up is everything and down just means all the white people want to party on your street on Sunday night to feel realness. Midway is nowhere.

Papa-Lo start thinking too deep and start thinking that he should be more than what he is. He's the worst kind of fool, the fool who start believing things can get better.

You ever see a man who doesn't know he's unhappy, Leopard? Look for it in the scars on his woman's face. Or in the excellence of his woodcraft and iron making, or in the masks he makes to wear himself because he forbids the world to see his own face. I am not happy, Leopard. But I am not unhappy that I know.

Is true, you do feel better about things the further you run from it

I hate when a man feels I'm obligated to disclose my marital status to somebody I don't even know. Even this bullshit about status itself as if married and spinster are the only two choices for defining myself. Or because I'm a woman I'm supposed to have a status at all.

Drunkenness was a communal and personal pleasure at once, a miserable state only to those not drinking. Sobriety to him was a cruel attack of conscience masking itself as awareness. If sober people were so aware, how come they only spoke truth when drunk? Give him the romance of a drunkard over the indignation of a teetotaler any day.

I tell myself that I tolerate Kimmy because she could never survive me even once talking to her the way she talks to me. I hate people like that, people you have to protect while they keep hurting you.

She not no fool, Lilith tell herself. She not a sleeping princess and Robert Quinn is not no king or prince. He just a man with broad shoulders and black hair who call her lovey and she like that more than her own name. She don't want the man to deliver her, she just want to climb in the bed and feel he wrap himself around her.

Write about only three things: what you love, what you hate, and what you're deeply conflicted about.

Gorgon say that Callisto was a woman who laugh all her life but never smile once.

Now he is a man who could talk to God and the devil and make them work they difference--as long as neither of them have a woman.

I see seven people in one room and one pregnant and people fucking anyway because people so poor that they can't even afford shame and I wait

I have a theory that while a man might not always get the wife he wants or needs, he always gets the wife he deserves.

Only a matter of time before you make enemies as ruthless as you, after all you're the one raising the bar

Nobody falls that way without being pushed. I know. And I know how it feels and looks, a body that falls fighting the air all the way down, grabbing onto clumps of nothing and begging once, just once, just goddamn once, Jesus, you sniveling son of a mongrel bitch, just once that air gives grip.

The child is dead. There is nothing left to know.

Everywhere I go to find this boy, to save this boy, I run into something worse than what we are saving him from … but we still think monsters are the ones with claws, and scales and skin.

Fucking hell. Shit sounds like I'm writing for ladies who lunch on Fifth Avenue. Unending vortex of ugly? Holy sensationalism, Batman! Who the fuck am I writing for? I could move in closer, get to the real Singer, but I'll just fail like every other journalist

I just need to fucking breathe

Reason is for rich people. We have madness.

Every negro walk in a circle. Take that and make of it what you will. A circle like the sun, a circle like the moon, a circle like bad tidings that seem gone but always, always come back.

Maybe because is December. After all, only when we come to Revelation that we take stock of Genesis, right?

And that's all this Prime Minister needed, a nice multi-syllable word like destabilization to turn it into a fucking jingle. But he threw us on the defensive in a way that I'll make sure never happens again. Of course the only people listening was Penthouse magazine. Goddamn, what does it mean when the conscience of America airbrushes pussy for a living?

And Smoke Girl. He who was mine said, One of them must have a name from where I come from. One must remind me of me. So he named Smoke Grl Khamseen, for the wind that blows fifty days.