Marlon James Quotes

If it no go so, it go near so. - Jamaican proverb

him swinging the baton and knocking out my side teeth and cracking my temple so that I can never hear good out of that ear again and saying let that be a lesson to never take you dutty, stinking, ghetto self uptown again. And I see them and I wait. But

Some man never get the woman who cure them from looking for another woman.

I was the nerd. Because I was reading. I wasn't into sports. I was really into art. Very geekish about comics. Assumed gay.

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.

Nineteen seventy-six come and bring an election with it. The man who bring guns to the ghetto made it clear, that there is no way that socialist government should win again.

He said he had evidence that the Company was giving the opposition party money, which was just preposterous considering what bad form it would have been, trusting anybody in the Third World with money.

This is the thing about redheads, isn't it? No matter how long you've lived with them, you're always surprised when they turn and look straight at you.

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

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

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

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.

The colony can change a man if he willing and there be things he can do here that he can't do nowhere else. Regard this, coming to a land where a man can seduce, rape or sodomise any niggerwoman or boy or girl he wish and there be nothing that nobody goin' do, for every other white man be doing the same...Negro take heed of the case of William Clarke, who rape and strangle five negro girl but nobody arrest until he kill Worthy Park Estate most expensive slave and get lock up for destroying property, not murder. But that don't stop the white man. As for the white woman, she can only turn her eye and sip tea.

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 think as they do that suffering from cruelty or escaping it is a matter of choice or means, when it is matter of power.

Gun Court lockup. He would still be there if Daddy didn't

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.

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.

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,

You could have a family of one and still drive them apart.

I think the Greeks were the only people ever to nail character. Their heroes are deeply flawed.

Is not gone, you're in the flatness of the deadlands. Time doesn't stop. You watch it move but you are still, like a painting with a Mona Lisa smile.

In 1976, Rastafarians were one of the most violated, persecuted groups in Jamaica. They could be beaten within an inch of their lives, or detained for two years, just for being found in a 'proper' neighbourhood.

We're not big on irony in Jamaica, sarcasm and double-talk. We tend to say things plainly, sometimes to the point of boredom.

I also know that too many people talk too much, especially the American, who never shut up, just switch to a laugh every time he talk 'bout you, and it sound strange how he put your name beside people we never hear 'bout, Allende Lumumba, a name that sound like a country that Kunta Kinte come from. The American, most of the time hide him eye with sunglasses like he is a preacher from America come to talk to black people. Him and the Cuban come sometimes together, sometimes on they own, and when one talk the other always quiet. The Cuban don't fuck with guns because guns always need to be needed, him say.

If reggae comes from another country, you can have the relationship to reggae that I have to rock. But it's something I grew up with. It's probably something I appreciate more now. In the '80s, I was all about New Wave and synth pop - New Order and Depeche Mode and Eurythmics and Michael Jackson and tons and tons and tons of Prince.

Some people just fated to fuck up even when them smart enough to know better.

I hate that just because I live here I'm supposed to live politics. And there's nothing you can do. If you don't live politics, politics will leave you.

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.

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Me have a rule with woman. If your titty prettier and your body hotter than my woman I'll deal with you. Otherwise, fuck off.

When building monsters don't be surprised when they become monstrous.

What really boils me blood is that it's not that Daddy didn't have money, but he never could think of a single good reason to spend it.

Jamaicans are so unflappable, they might as well be Minnesotans.

Not every gay person recites poetry or has read Keats. You can get readers through anything if the characters are complicated. You can't dismiss Josey Wales' quite liberal worldview.

At 28 years old, seven years out of college, I was so convinced that my voice outed me as a fag that I had stopped speaking to people I didn't know.

- You different, Lilith. You have more darkness 'bout you now. You turning into woman, Homer say to her. - Me turning into something, Lilith say.

Devil has his part to play.

Nobody ever own a gun. You don't know that until you own one.

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.

But he starting to confuse representing people with owning them, and soon even he going need a reckoning.

We shouldn't romanticize rejection. There's nothing romantic about rejection. It's horrible.

Everybody know that condom and birth control was white man scheme to kill off black people, but he don't care.

We don't own truth. Truth is truth and nothing you can do about it even if you hide it, or kill it, or even tell it. It was truth before you open your mouth and say, That there is a true thing.

The book hard and soft at once, the cover when she run her fingers over it feel like linen or osnaburg, but the book also hard like wood and thick. The book red like wine or blood. She never smell anything like that ever. A scent like oil, or mayhaps white man armpit, or dust and something else, all of them smelling something awful apart but together make the most wonderfullest thing. Lilith close her eye and breathe in the smell like tobacco.

Part of it seems like how these Americans grew up. They collect things. So Tony Curtis or Tony Orlando will show up at Mantana's and they all ask him for this autograph business, which is him signing his name on a napkin. And they cling to it, and collect it like they'll never see Tony Curtis again. Now Chuck is taking things home, collecting them like he had to make sure they were safe. I don't know what he has to protect a coffee cup from. Or five boxes of rubber bands, a picture of Farrah Fawcett, a picture of President Carter or a box full of liquor as if they don't have liquor in America. Or a sculpture of a Rastaman grabbing on to his an erect penis, the head bigger than his actual head. The man must think he is Noah saving a statue of a Rasta with a huge cock for his ark. If he's saving that fucking sculpture and don't plan to save me I swear to God I will kill him.

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

But sometimes when you're too careful it just turns into a different kind of carelessness.

I'm really interested in how non-American countries process race.

After Tuesday come Wednesday. And what you do on Tuesday change the type of Wednesday that going come to you.

- What? - How the girl getting

Because people so poor that they can't even afford shame and I wait.

Me love that man to the max. Me would take a bullet for the Singer. But gentlemens, me can only take one.

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

If a man call himself Rasta today, by next week that is him speaking prophecy. He don't have to be too smart either, just know one or two hellfire and brimstone verse from the Bible. Or just claim it come from Leviticus since nobody ever read Leviticus. This is how you know. Nobody who get to the end of Leviticus can still take that book seriously. Even in a book full of it, that book is mad as shit. Don't lie with man as with woman, sure I can run with that reasoning. But don't eat crab?

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

They like him better when he was the poor cousin that they can feel good for taking notice. I tell him that politician do the same thing to me when they realize me can read.

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

The white man say we're fighting for freedom from totalitarianism, terrorism and tyranny, but nobody know what he mean. I

What I find, particularly with young writers and readers, is that they don't want complicated feelings.

People who say they don't have a choice just too coward to choose.

Caribbean literature only has to be true to itself. It doesn't need colonialism or imperialism. It's always been vibrant.

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.

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?

I just need to fucking breathe

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

I think, for me, there's The Book I Should Write and The Book I Wanted to Write - and they weren't the same book. The Book I Should Write should be realistic, since I studied English Lit. It should be cultural. It should reflect where I am today. The Book I Wanted to Write would probably include flying women, magic, and all of that.

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.

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.

See how the white womens goin' look and hear how white womens laugh in the colonies. She think of white flesh and black flesh, that really be brown flesh by blood and the two flesh melt into one flesh that don't know colour. Then Lilith wonder if she dreaming because dreaming is one thing God never allow negro to do.

Police only have to see that me don't have no shoes before he say what the bloodcloth you nasty naiggers doing 'round decent people, and give me two choices.

Preacher says there is a god-shaped void in everybody life but the only thing ghetto people can fill a void with is void.

I wanted a picture of Jamaica that isn't in books, and certainly not in novels.

Some of the craziest aspects about 'Weeper' were the things I found out to be true. I mean, true of people.

There was never a single murder in my neighbourhood; there was barely a robbery. It was so suburban, it was almost disappointing.

In creative writing, I teach that characters arise out of our need for them.

Every time you reach the edge, the edge move ahead of you like a shadow until the whole world is a ghetto, and you wait.

I'm not a writer on a mission, and I'm very suspicious of writers on missions, but I'm also not living a false life.

I might be a snob, but at least I'm not a hypocrite, still coasting around because I have nothing to do now that my life's dream to fuck and breed for Che Guevara blew up in my face. Nor am I hanging out with rich people in West Kings House who now don't wash their hair and calling themselves I-man to upset their parents, when everybody knows in two years they're going right back to their father's shipping company to take it over, and marry whichever Syrian bitch just win Miss Jamaica.

I'd spent seven years in an all-boys school: 2,000 adolescents in the same khaki uniforms striking hunting poses, stalking lunchrooms, classrooms, changing rooms, looking for boys who didn't fit in.

If your depiction of loss doesn't make the reader feel loss, then you didn't depict it right.

Woman breed baby, but man can only make Frankenstein.

People think blood red, but blood don't got no colour. Not when blood wash the floor she lying on as she scream for that son of a bitch to come, the lone baby of 1785. Not when the baby wash in crimson and squealing like it just depart heaven to come to hell, another place of red. Not when the midwife know that the mother shed too much blood, and she who don't reach fourteen birthday yet speak curse 'pon the chile and the papa, and then she drop down dead like old horse. Not when blood spurt from the skin, on spring from the axe, the cat-o'-nine, the whip, the cane and the blackjack and every day in slave life is a day that colour red. It soon come to pass when red no different from white or blue or black or nothing. Two black legs spread wide and mother mouth screaming. A black baby wiggling in blood on the floor with skin darker than midnight but the greenest eyes anybody ever done seen. I goin' call her Lilith. You can call her what they call her.

Being a fool is a curse too

Then I wondered if everybody has that person that haunts them, the one that got away.

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.

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

That's what happens when you personify hopes and dreams in one person. He becomes nothing more than a literary device.

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.

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

They turned over the reception desk and the poor security guards did the only thing they could do. They ran.

I want to lie down in the grass on the sidewalk and I want to run and keep running.

People with a plan see and wait for the right time.

-Come on, Bill. As small as America's dick is, those limeys will stretch across the Atlantic to suck it.

As a writer of colour, you have to be victim or perpetrator.

Dead people never stop talking.

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.

Because homophobia is still largely driven by the church, it's legitimised. It's also tied to sexism, because those two are never far apart.

Then coffin, black with silver handles with the dead boy in a black velvet suit. If you're never gonna sweat why not go out in winter style?

Something new is blowing. On a downtown Kingston wall: IMF - Is Manley Fault. General election called for October 30, 1980. Somebody is driving you through Bavaria, near the Austrian border. A hospital sprouting out of the forest like magic. Hills in the background tipped with snow like cake icing. You meet the tall and frosty Bavarian, the man who helps the hopeless. He smiles but his eyes are set too far back and they vanish in the shadow of his brow. Cancer is a red alert that the whole body is in danger, he says. Thank God the food he forbids, Rastafari had forbidden long time. A sunrise is a promise. Something new is blowing. November 1980. A new party wins the general election and the man who killed me steps up to the podium with his brothers to take over the country. He has been waiting for so long he leaps up the stairs and trips.

I swear to God I can't remember when I had a handbag. I know for some woman it's like an eleventh finger and you don't even think about it, even if you change every day. But I can't remember the handbag either. Who can run with a handbag?