Top 70 James McBride Quotes
#2. 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
#3. God is the color of water. Water doesn't have a color.
James McBride
#4. They'll pull the trigger and tell the hammer to hurry.
James McBride
#5. 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
#6. 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
#8. See, a marriege needs love. And God. And a little money. That's all.
James McBride
#9. 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
#10. I wouldn't throw her outta bed for eating crackers. She was all class.
James McBride
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. This is what happens when a boy becomes a man. You get stupider.
James McBride
#15. And when James asked what color God was, she said, God is the color of water.
James McBride
#16. 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
#17. Writer or a musician, not knowing that it was possible
James McBride
#18. 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
#19. The question of religion in black America is something filmmakers don't want to touch.
James McBride
#20. Whatever you is, Onion," he said, "be it full.
James McBride
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. We'll be colored when the day's done, no matter how the cut comes or goes.
James McBride
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. If you have the material it will form itself as a kind of connective tissue.
James McBride
#28. 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
#29. The man was the finest preacher. He could make a frog stand up straight and get happy with Jesus.
James McBride
#30. God gived you the seed. But the watering and caring of that seed is up to you.
James McBride
#31. 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
#32. Writing for me is cutting out the fat and getting to the meaning.
James McBride
#33. Until you expose the cancer, you can't fix it.
James McBride
#34. 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
#35. The Negro comes in many colors. Dark. Black. Blacker. Blackest. Blacker than night. Black as hell. Black as tar.
James McBride
#36. Family is the last and greatest discovery. It is our last miracle.
James McBride
#37. 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
#38. There ain't no time for foolishness now. You in it now. You got to stay in it.
James McBride
#39. The enemy was irony and truth and hypocrisy, that was the real enemy. That was the enemy that was killing him.
James McBride
#40. He was apparently a small man, according to Mr. Higgins, with girly features, curly hair . . . and the heart of a rascal.
James McBride
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. Newt Gingrich wrote a novel, and he's a short story. Bill Clinton wrote a biography, and he's a novel.
James McBride
#48. 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
#49. You have to choose between what the world expects of you and what you want for yourself,
James McBride
#50. ...for one thing you learns when you is a girl is that most women's hearts is full of secrets.
James McBride
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. As a journalist, the details always tell the story.
James McBride
#56. I was ashamed of my mother, but see, love didn't come natural to me until I became a Christian.- Ruth McBride
James McBride
#57. 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
#58. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. Not a week after Annie put her foot in Mrs. Huffmaster's duff, the Captain upped and laid down the date.
James McBride
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. First person narrative is a very effective tool but you have to know as a writer how to make it work.
James McBride
#70. 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
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