Marlon James > Quotes

“Killing don’t need no reason. This is ghetto. Reason is for rich people. We have madness.”
― Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings

“I think that’s what Toni Morrison and Alice Walker understand, the secret language of women. That it’s not a secret at all; men just don’t know how to listen.”
― Marlon James

“...Love isn’t saying, I love you but calling to say, did you eat”
― Marlon James

“But in another city, another valley, another ghetto, another slum, another favela, another township, another intifada, another war, another birth, somebody is singing Redemption Song, as if the Singer wrote it for no other reason but for this sufferah to sing, shout, whisper, weep, bawl, and scream right here, right now.”
― Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings

“—The problem with a book is that you never know what it’s planning to do to you until you’re too far into it.”
― Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings

“If it no go so, it go near so. —Jamaican proverb”
― Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings

“Those who think he had lucky breaks are not only unaware of the real story but also fall prey to that sin of the mediocre: bitchiness about others’ success”
― Marlon James

“But sometimes when you’re too careful it just turns into a different kind of carelessness.”
― Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings

“The dream didn’t leave, people just don’t know a nightmare when they right in the middle of one.”
― Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings

“That’s what happens when you personify hopes and dreams in one person. He becomes nothing more than a literary device.”
― Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings

“Bi oju ri enu a pamo.

Not everything the eye sees should be spoken by the mouth.”
― Marlon James, Black Leopard, Red Wolf

“A man will suffer misery to get to the bottom of truth, but he will not suffer boredom.”
― Marlon James, Black Leopard, Red Wolf

“because people so poor that they can’t even afford shame and I wait.”
― Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings

“You know, most of this feminism business was nothing more than white American women telling non-white women what to do and how to do it, with this patronizing if-you-become-just-like-me-you’ll-be-free bullshit,”
― Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings

“One of the things I fucking hate about my fellow Americans: whenever they fly to a foreign country, first thing they do, they try to find as much of America as they can get their hands on, even if it's food in the shitty cafeteria.”
― Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings

“He is my friend.”

“Nobody ever gets betrayed by their enemy.”
― Marlon James, Black Leopard, Red Wolf

“People who say they don’t have a choice just too coward to choose.”
― Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings

“Jamaica never gets worse or better, it just finds new ways to stay the same.”
― Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings

“When building monsters don't be surprised when they become monstrous.”
― Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings

“Living people wait and see because they fool themselves that they have time. Dead people see and wait.”
― Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings

“Bad feeling is a country no woman want to visit. So they take good feeling any which way it come. Sometime that good feeling come by taking on a different kind of bad feeling.”
― Marlon James, The Book of Night Women

“She not black, she mulatto. Mulatto, mulatto, mulatto. Maybe she be family to both and to hurt white man just as bad as hurting black man…..Maybe if she start to think that she not black or white, then she won’t have to care about neither man’s affairs. Maybe if she don’t care what other people think she be and start think about what she think she be, maybe she can rise over backra and nigger business, since neither ever mean her any good. Since the blood that run through her both black and white, maybe she be her own thing. But what thing she be?”
― Marlon James, The Book of Night Women

“Hate and love be closer cousin than like and dislike.”
― Marlon James, The Book of Night Women

“Woman breed baby, but man can only make Frankenstein.”
― Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings

“When kings fall they fall on top of us.”
― Marlon James, Black Leopard, Red Wolf

“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. It’s the way I’ve discovered to not do a damn thing. If you can break a day down into quarters, then hours, then half hours, then minutes, you can chew down any stretch of time to bite size. It’s like dealing with losing a man. If you can bear it for one minute, then you can swallow two, then five, then another five and on and on. If I don’t want to think about my life, I don’t have to think about life at all, just hold for one minute, then two, then five, then another five, before you know it, a month can pass and you don’t even notice because you’ve only been counting minutes.”
― Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings

“I hate people like that, people you have to protect while they keep hurting you.”
― Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings

“You ever feel like home is the one place you can’t go back to? It’s like you promise yourself when you got out of bed and combed your hair that this evening, when I get back I’ll be a different woman in a new place. And now you can’t go back because the house expects something from you.”
― Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings

“Make me tell you something else about reading. You see this? Every time you open this you get free. Freeness up in here and nobody even have to know you get free but you." ~Homer, The Book of Night Women”
― Marlon James, The Book of Night Women

“Never think about the past, that shit will fuck you up and you cant fuck it back”
― Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings