James McBride Quotes & Sayings

It was always so hot, and everyone was so polite, and everything was all surface but underneath it was like a bomb waiting to go off. I always felt that way about the South, that beneath the smiles and southern hospitality and politeness were a lot of guns and liquor and secrets. — James McBride

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 — James McBride

She wore a flowered blue dress of the type whores naturally favored, and that thing was so tight that when she moved, the daisies got all mixed up with the azaleas. She walked like a warm room full of smoke. — James McBride

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

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. — James McBride

If you're going to cheat and take people's history and you're not writing the Bible, you ain't really so great. But if you try to do it in a way that doesn't hurt too many people, then you probably can get out of bed in the morning and look at yourself in the mirror. — James McBride

Chase looked 'round and seen Frederick's grave where we'd buried him.
"Who's that?"
"Don't know. We been hiding in this thicket while the Free Staters was scouting 'round here. I heard 'em say it was one of theirs."
Chase pondered the grave thoughtfully. "It's a fresh grave. We ought to see if who'sever in there got on boots," he said. — James McBride

The man was the finest preacher. He could make a frog stand up straight and get happy with Jesus. — James McBride

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

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. — James McBride

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

There ain't no time for foolishness now. You in it now. You got to stay in it. — James McBride

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

Since I was a little boy, she had always wanted me to go. She was always sending me off on a bus someplace, to elementary school, to camp, to relatives in Kentucky, to college. She pushed me away from her just as she'd pushed my elder siblings away when we lived in New York, literally shoving them out the front door when they left for college. — James McBride

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. — James McBride

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

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

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. — James McBride

skinny as horsehair in a glass of milk — James McBride

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

I'm one of the few Black writers, or African American writers, who managed to work my way through the system so that it has allowed me to speak in a kind of free way. But most African American writers don't have that. They don't have that opportunity, they don't have that. — James McBride

The black church will accept anybody. — James McBride

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. — James McBride

Whatever he believed, he believed. It didn't matter to him whether it was really true or not. He just changed the truth till it fit him. He was a real white man. — James McBride

My family is my career. — James McBride

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. — James McBride

was. The constant learning and — James McBride

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. — James McBride

The Good Lord Bird don't run in a flock. He Flies alone. You know why? He's searching. Looking for the right tree. And when he sees that tree, that dead tree that's taking all the nutrition and good things from the forest floor. He goes out and he gnaws at it, and he gnaws at it till the thing gets tired and it falls down. And the dirt from it raises other trees. It gives them good things to eat. It makes 'em strong. Gives 'em life. And the circle goes 'round. — James McBride

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. — James McBride

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

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

As a journalist, I never critiqued anyone. I never review books. I've never felt qualified as a musician to say whether someone is a good musician or a bad musician. What happens with Black writers and Black artists is that if you're critiqued, for example, by a Black historian who wants to get his name on the cover of "The New York Times," and he says something, like, wacky, well, he'll get his name on the cover of "The New York Times" and he might get tenure, and your career suffers. — James McBride

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. — James McBride

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 — James McBride

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

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. — James McBride

So sweet and precious is family life. — James McBride

I'd like to do something involving jazz. But books are how I earn my living, and I'd like to stay with the horse I rode in on. — James McBride

God gived you the seed. But the watering and caring of that seed is up to you. — James McBride

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. — James McBride

God I am looking for the one thing I have never felt but once, and I would walk through heaven and earth to find it, if he would but let me find him, so that I could feel it; and if I were to feel it again I would never leave that feeling, or him that gave it to me." - The Dreamer — James McBride

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

This is what happens when a boy becomes a man. You get stupider. — James McBride

Be kind to the living. — James McBride

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. — James McBride

The plain truth is that you'd have an easier time standing in the middle of the Mississippi River and requesting that it flow backward than to expect people of different races and backgrounds to stop loving each other, stop marrying each other, stop starting families, stop enjoying the dreams that love inspires. Love is unstoppable. It is our greatest weapon, a natural force, created by God. I — James McBride

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? — James McBride

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

I'm proud of 'Miracle at St. Anna' and I loved it; there's no question in my mind it's as good as any movie that came out in 2007. — James McBride

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. — James McBride

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. — James McBride

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

He had gotten a new set of clothes someplace, but they were only worse new versions of the same thing he wore before: black trousers, black vest, frock coat, stiff collar, withered, crumpled, and chewed at the edges. His boots was worse than ever, crumpled like pieces of text paper, curled at the toes. In other words, he looked normal, like his clothes was dying of thirst, and he himself was about to keel over out of plain ugliness. — James McBride

How long could I go on before she'd find out who I was? She'd know it before long. Besides, how can somebody love you if you don't know who you is? — James McBride

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. — James McBride

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. — James McBride

Family is the last and greatest discovery. It is our last miracle. — James McBride

When you're interviewing someone, even your mother - you have to sort of deal with you have to get some objective space from yourself and the person but you also have to find what's the best way to get the information from that person. — James McBride

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

here he dug in his pockets and produced a thimble, a root, two empty tin cans, three Indian arrowheads, an apple peeler, a dried-up boll weevil, and a bent pocketknife. — James McBride

Writer or a musician, not knowing that it was possible — James McBride

I come to the understanding that maybe what was on the inside was more important, and that your outer covering didn't count so much as folks thought it did, colored or white, man or woman. — James McBride

I wish all critics, no matter their color, were more sophisticated when it comes to the moral questions a film like 'St. Anna' is trying to raise. — James McBride

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. — James McBride

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. — James McBride

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. — James McBride

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

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

Writing for me is cutting out the fat and getting to the meaning. — James McBride

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. — James McBride

James Brown hid everything, and in the game of instant information he lost big-time, because the information machine turns a truth into a lie and a lie into the truth, transforms superstitions and stereotypes into fact with such ease and fluidity that after a while you get to believing as I do, that the media is not a reflection of the American culture but rather is teaching it. As long as James Brown was selling records he let that craziness run. He didn't care. The media worked in his favor and helped fuel his success. But it killed his public reputation and once the success was gone once the head disappeared, the body followed. — James McBride

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 — James McBride

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. — James McBride

He was apparently a small man, according to Mr. Higgins, with girly features, curly hair . . . and the heart of a rascal. — James McBride

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

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. — James McBride

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. — James McBride

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

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. — James McBride

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. — James McBride

I'm trying to educate people about things that I believe are right, and some of the things that I believe are right might not be right, so I live in constant self-doubt. I think that creates a kind of search that you have to have, and it prevents you from doing a lot of stuff that you would normally do. — James McBride

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. — James McBride

God is the color of water. Water doesn't have a color. — James McBride

It's the same old story. Nothing in this world happens unless white folks says it happens. And therein lies the problem of being a professional black storyteller - writer, musician, filmmaker. — James McBride

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. — James McBride

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

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. — James McBride

As a journalist, the details always tell the story. — James McBride

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. — James McBride