Quotes from Marlon James

Black woman hard to laugh, for she must keep it secret and quiet-like for all white man suspicious of negro mirth.

am slowly realizing that even though the Singer is the center of the story that it really isn't his story. Like there's a version of this story that's not really about him, but about the people around him, the ones who come and go that might actually provide a bigger picture than me asking him why he smokes ganja.

sadness is not the absence of happiness, but the opposite of it.

Homer say, Pretty gal go a river and see herself in water. Pretty gal drown when she go down to kiss herself.

people just don't know a nightmare when they right in the middle of one.

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.

What making love feel like?" "Making love? Like the longest sweetest tickling. Then it turn into something else and bump come up under your skin and is like one wave hit you toe and wash all the way up to you head, sometime one, two, three time. You never know two people could make that one feeling. With Benjy, me used to shake and move so hard because he do it so good. And you pussy? It feel like it just get bless. Making love is good thing, Lilith.

Learn this, all nice and decent people. An election year commence as soon as the first gunshot buss.

I like to believe that everything in my house, from towels all the same colour, to the coffee machine where I press one button, is there just to make my life simple, but I'm realizing that they are all there to make sure I don't think.

I want her to look at me and smile just to show that she knows that I know that she knows

Because every man who fight monster become a monster too, and there be at least one woman in Kingston who think me is the killer of all things name hope. People think me lose it because it bother me that me kill the school boy by mistake, but don't realize that me losing it because it supposed to bother me but don't.

Soldier don't act like we is crime and them is order, soldier act like we is enemy and this is war.

It's not just the lawlessness. It's the grabbing of a myth and making it theirs, like a reggae singer dropping new lyrics 'pon di old version. And if a western needs an O.K. Corral, an O.K. Corral needs a Dodge City. Kingston, where bodies sometimes drop like flies, fits the description a little too well.

You never know when people's dreams are connected to you before you're gone and then there's nothing to do, but watch them die in a different way, slow, limb by limb, system by system.

The two men who bring guns to the ghetto don't know what to do since when music hit you can't hit it back.

Better to be with the ancestors than to live bonded to somebody else, who might be kind, who might be cruel, who might even make you master to many slaves of your own, but was still master over you.

But some fire don't go out, they go quiet under the ash, waiting for one little dry stick to feed. So the white man sleep with one eye open, waiting for the fire next time. That fire coming.

Sometimes war stop because you forget why you fight, sometimes you tired of warring, sometimes people who dead come back to you in you sleep and you can't remember them name, and sometimes you come to see that who you supposed to fight not even your enemy

For you to say that sadness is not the absence of happiness, but the opposite of it.

Rastaman don't deal with negativity so oppression is now downpression even though there is no up in the word. Dedicate is livicate, I and I, well God knows what that means, but it sounds like somebody trying for their own holy trinity but forgetting the name of the third person.

This is the first mistake God make. Time. God was a fool to create time. It's the one thing that even he run out of. But me beyond time. Me in the now, which is now which is also then. Then is also soon and soon might as well be if.

Dead people never stop talking.

whenever you hold a gun, it's really the gun that's holding you.

Politicians rise in the east and set in the west and nothing you can change about them.