James McBride QUOTES

141 " They did not grow up like the children of the eighties and nineties, stripped of any semblance of family other than the constant presence of drugs and violence. Their “I was raised with nuthin’ and went to Harvard anyway” experience was the criterion that white editors used to hire them. But then again, that was partly how I got through too. The whole business made me want to scream. "

― James McBride , The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother

143 " My own humanity was awakened, rising up to greet me with a handshake as I watched the first glimmers of sunlight peek over the horizon. There’s such a big difference between being dead and alive, I told myself, and 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 left for New York happy in the knowledge that my grandmother had not suffered and died for nothing. "

― James McBride , The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother

145 " By age twenty, her marriage prospects were dim. By thirty-five, they were hopeless. She seemed nonplussed, however, "

― James McBride , Miracle at St. Anna

147 " ...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 , The Good Lord Bird

149 " It made me a bit sad, truth be to tell it, to watch them hundreds of white folks crying for the Negro, for there weren't hardly ever any Negroes present at most of them gatherings, and them that was there was doodied up and quiet as a mouse. It seemed to me the whole business of the Negro's life out there weren't no different than it was out west, to my mind. It was like a big, long lynching. Everybody got to make a speech about the Negro but the Negro. "

― James McBride , The Good Lord Bird

151 " She never spoke about Jewish people as white. She spoke about them as Jews, which made them somehow different. "

― James McBride , The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother

153 " Being a Negro means showing your best face to the white man every day. You know his wants, his needs, and watch him prosper. But he don't know your wants. He don't know your needs or feelings or what's inside you, for you ain't equal to him in no measure. You just a n****r to him. A thing: like a dog or a shovel or a horse. Your needs and wants got no track, whether you is a girl or a boy, a woman or a man, or shy, or fat, or don't eat biscuits, or can't suffer the change of weather easily. What difference do it make? None to him, for you is living on the bottom rail. "

― James McBride , The Good Lord Bird

155 " Then he placed his hands in his pockets and stood in the middle of the street alone, giving the silent roaring rage inside him time to ease down and out, and after several long minutes he once again became who he was, a solitary middle-aged man in the August of life looking for a few more Aprils, an aging bachelor in a floppy suit standing on a tired, worn Brooklyn street in the shadow of a giant housing project built by a Jewish reformer named Robert Moses who forgot he was a reformer, building projects like this all over, which destroyed neighborhoods, chasing out the working Italians, Irish, and Jews, gutting all the pretty things from them, displacing them with Negroes and Spanish and other desperate souls clambering to climb into the attic of New York life, hoping that the bedroom and kitchen below would open up so they could drop in, and at minimum join the club that to them included this man, an overweight bachelor in an ill-fitting suit, watching a shiny car roaring away, the car driven by a handsome young man who was pretty and drove away as if he were barreling into a bright future, while the dowdy heavyset man watched him jealously, believing the man so pretty and handsome had places to go and women to meet and things to do, and the older heavyset man standing behind eating his fumes on a sorry, dreary, crowded old Brooklyn street of storefronts and tired brownstones had nothing left but the fumes of the pretty sports car in his face. "

― James McBride , Deacon King Kong

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

― James McBride , The Good Lord Bird

159 " He was apparently a small man, according to Mr. Higgins, “with girly features, curly hair . . . and the heart of a rascal. "

― James McBride , The Good Lord Bird