James McBride Quotes

Most cars drove through there because the drivers is either from The Bottom and wanna get home - or they ain't from The Bottom and wanna get home in one piece.

I had thoroughly been a girl so long by then that I'd grown to like it, got used to it, got used to not having to lift things, and have folks make excuses for me on account of me not being strong enough, or fast enough, or powerful enough like a boy, on account of my size. But that's the thing. You can play one part in life, but you can't be that thing. You just playing it. You're not real.

My siblings had already instilled the notion of black pride in me. I would have preferred that Mommy were black. Now, as a grown man, I feel privileged to have come from two worlds. My view of the world is not merely that of a black man but that of a black man with something of a Jewish soul. I don't consider myself Jewish, but when I look at Holocaust photographs of Jewish women whose children have been wrenched from them by Nazi soldiers, the women look like my own mother and I think to myself, There but for the grace of God goes my own mother - and by extension, myself.

The thing that I do is that when I fail, I just keep quiet about it. I just let it go. It's done. I just go to the next thing. I don't complain, I don't go to - I pick my battles very, very judiciously, and I just assume that there's good in the heart of everybody.

The old face, crinkled and dented with canals running every which way, pushed and shoved up against itself for a while, till a big old smile busted out from beneath 'em all, and his grey eyes fairly glowed. It was the first time I ever saw him smile free. A true smile. It was like looking at the face of God. And I knowed then, for the first time, that him being the person to lead the colored to freedom weren't no lunacy. It was something he knowed true inside him. I saw it clear for the first time. I knowed then, too, that he knowed what I was - from the very first.

in fact that's what I liked about black folks all my life: They never judged me. My black friends never asked me how much money I made, or what school my children went to, or anything like that. They just said, "Come as you are." Blacks have always been peaceful and trusting.

The Negro comes in many colors. Dark. Black. Blacker. Blackest. Blacker than night. Black as hell. Black as tar.

,',,[B]ut you remind me of things I can't think about no more. I'm in the last October of life looking for a few more Aprils. I don't want to remember no more.

A man who doesn't trust cannot be trusted

But at the end of the day, there are some questions that have no answers, and then one answer that has no question: love rules the game. Every time. All the time. That's what counts.

Sometimes it seemed like the truth was a bandy-legged soul who dashed from one side of the world to the other and I could never find him.

I was ashamed of my mother, but see, love didn't come natural to me until I became a Christian.- Ruth McBride

Whatever you is, Onion," he said, "be it full.

See, dance changes people. Dancing makes you free. It makes people happy.

...for one thing you learns when you is a girl is that most women's hearts is full of secrets.

Not a week after Annie put her foot in Mrs. Huffmaster's duff, the Captain upped and laid down the date.

Owens, our minister, would get up from his seat and stop the song. He'd sit behind his pulpit in a spiritual trance, his eyes closed, clad in a long blue robe with a white scarf and billowed sleeves, as if he were prepared to float away to heaven himself, until one of Mommy's clunker notes roused him. One eye would pop open with a jolt, as if someone had just poured cold water down his back. He'd coolly run the eye in a circle, gazing around at the congregation of forty-odd parishioners to see where the whirring noise was coming from. When his eye landed on Mommy, he'd nod as if to say, "Oh, it's just Sister Jordan"; then he'd slip back into his spiritual trance.

They'll pull the trigger and tell the hammer to hurry.

We'll be colored when the day's done, no matter how the cut comes or goes.

If you have the material it will form itself as a kind of connective tissue.

If you think looking at three hundred boiling-mad, half-cocked Virginians holding every kind of breechloader under God's sun staring back at you with murder in their eyes is a ticket to redemption, you is on the dot.

It occurred to me then that you is everything you are in this life at every moment. And that includes loving somebody. If you can't be your own self, how can you love somebody? How can you be free? That pressed on my heart like a vise right then. Just mashed me down.

I asked her if I was black or white. She replied You are a human being. Educate yourself or you'll be a nobody!

I felt like a Tinker toy kid building my own self out of one of those toy building sets; for as she laid her life before me, I reassembled the tableau of her words like a picture puzzle, and as I did, so my own life was rebuilt.

The enemy was irony and truth and hypocrisy, that was the real enemy. That was the enemy that was killing him.

See, a marriege needs love. And God. And a little money. That's all.

Sometimes without conscious realization, our thoughts, our faith, out interests are entered into the past. We talk about other times, other places, other persons, and lose our living hold on the present. Sometimes we think if we could just go back in time we would be happy. But anyone who attempts to reenter the past is sure to be disappointed. Anyone who has ever revisited the place of his birth after years of absence is shocked by the differences between the way the place actually is, and the way he has remembered it. He may walk along old familiar streets and roads, but he is a stranger in a strange land. He has thought of this place as home, but he finds he is no longer here even in spirit. He has gone onto a new and different life, and in thinking longingly of the past, he has been giving thought and interest to something that no longer really exists.

Wilmington, Del. (AP) June 14, 1966 - A fire that destroyed the city's oldest Negro church has led to the discovery of a wild slave narrative that highlights a little-known era of American history. The First United

She does her hair in an Afro like Cicely Tyson, that famous actress I seen on TV once, or Angela Davis, who I don't know exactly who she is but they say she's got guts and ain't scared of white people.

Slavery was a web of relationships, and if people knew how thick the whole business was, they would not make fun of people like Harriet Tubman. They would understand how intelligent she was and how sharp.

As a boy, I never knew where my mother was from
where she was born, who her parents were. When I asked she'd say, "God made me." When I asked if she was white, she'd say, "I'm light-skinned," and change the subject. She raised twelve black children and sent us all to college and in most cases graduate school. Her children became doctors, professors, chemists, teachers
yet none of us even knew her maiden name until we were grown. It took me fourteen years to unearth her remarkable story
the daughter of an Orthodox Jewish rabbi, she married a black man in 1942
and she revealed it more as a favor to me than out of any desire to revisit her past. Here is her life as she told it to me, and betwixt and between the pages of her life you will find mine as well.

was. The constant learning and

You have to choose between what the world expects of you and what you want for yourself,

The question of religion in black America is something filmmakers don't want to touch.

I asked her who he was and she said, "He was a man ahead of his time." She actually liked Malcolm X. She put him in nearly the same category as her other civil rights heroes, Paul Robeson, Jackie Robinson, Eleanor Roosevelt, A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Kennedys - any Kennedy. When Malcolm X talked about "the white devil" Mommy simply felt those references didn't apply to her.

First person narrative is a very effective tool but you have to know as a writer how to make it work.

Wonderful," he said. "Tell me. Which books in the Bible do you favor?"
"Oh, I favors 'em all," Pa said. "But I mostly like Hezekiel, Ahab, Trotter, and Pontiff the Emperor."
The Old Man frowned. "I don't recollect I have read those," he said.

We all got to die," she said. "But dying as your true self is always better. God'll take you however you come to Him. But it's easier on a soul to come to Him clean. You're forever free that way. From top to bottom.

I wouldn't throw her outta bed for eating crackers. She was all class.

Some things in this world just ain't mean to be, not in the times we want 'em to, and the heart has to hold it in this world as a remembrance, a promise for the world that's to come. There's a prize at the end of all of it, but still, that's a heavy load to bear.

He was like everybody in war. He believed God was on his side. Everybody got God on their side in a war. Problem is, God ain't tellin' nobody who He's for.

Until you expose the cancer, you can't fix it.

I'm not interested in food. It's just fuel.

There's such a big difference between being dead and alive, I told myself, the greatest gift that anyone can give anyone else is life. And the greatest sin a person can do to another is to take away that life. Next to that, all the rules and religions in the world are secondary; mere words and beliefs that people choose to believe and kill and hate by. My life won't be lived that way, and neither, I hope, will my children's.

I just read history books. I read nothing but history books. They have so much to give; I wish I'd majored in history in college.

And when James asked what color God was, she said, God is the color of water.

My family is my career.

skinny as horsehair in a glass of milk

A bird who flies is special. You would never trap a bird who flies" (218).

But as a kid, I preferred the black side, and often wished that Mommy had sent me to black schools like my friends. Instead I was stuck at that white school, P.S. 138, with white classmates who were convinced I could dance like James Brown. They constantly badgered me to do the "James Brown" for them, a squiggling of the feet made famous by the "Godfather of Soul" himself, who back in the sixties was bigger than life. I tried to explain to them that I couldn't dance. I have always been one of the worst dancers that God has ever put upon this earth.

The Old Man's prayers was more sight than sound, really, more sense than sensibility. You had to be there: the aroma of burnt pheasant rolling through the air, the wide, Kansas prairie about, the smell of buffalo dung, the mosquitoes and wind eating at you one way, and him chawing at the wind the other. He was a plain terror in the praying department

People don't realize you're blowing over changes, time changes, harmony, different keys. I mark a point in my solo where it's got to peak at point D I go to A, B, C D then I'm home.

I could have been, and may one day well be a high school English teacher, because I've been given so much I just feel like I have to give something back. The fact that some people consider my work to be good or strong, it's nice, but I know in my heart that if it's not coming - oftentimes it's probably not coming from the best place.

My parents were nonmaterialistic. They believed that money without knowledge was worthless, that education tempered with religion was the way to climb out of poverty in America, and over the years they were proven right.

It's God's world. He washes you clean. He makes you whole. He puts rain in your garden and sunshine in your heart. "Clarence

A body can't prosper if a person don't know who they are. That makes you poor as a pea, not knowing who you are inside. That's worse than being anything in the world on the outside.

The greatest gift that anyone can give anyone is LIFE. And the greatest sin a person can do is to take away that life. NEXT to that, all rules and religions in the worldare secondary, mere words and beliefs that people CHOOSE to believe and KILL and HATE by.

See, a marriage needs love. And God. And a little money. That's all. The rest you can deal with. It's not about black or white. It's about God and don't let anyone tell you different. All this Jungle fever! Shoot! The Jungle fever goes away, honey, and then what are you gonna do?

I was so sorry, deep in my heart I was sorry, but all your "sorrys" are gone when a person dies. She was gone. Gone. That's why you have to say all your "sorrys" and "I love yous" while a person is living, because tomorrow isn't promised.

You're not a Black man. You're a human being in God's eyes. So when you sit down to talk to someone and you talk to them in really intelligent terms, you ask difficult questions, there's a militancy that's assigned to you without you asking for it, because you are simply judged by what you look like. If you're a white person asking the same questions, you'd be one of these CNN guys and say how brilliant he is. That doesn't work for you, because this is the world we live in.

Newt Gingrich wrote a novel, and he's a short story. Bill Clinton wrote a biography, and he's a novel.

So sweet and precious is family life.

The black church will accept anybody.

As a journalist, the details always tell the story.