Top 140 James McBride Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “God is the color of water. Water doesn’t have a color.”

— James McBride

Featured in: Quotes About Water

2. “Put yourself in God’s hands and you can’t go wrong.”

— James McBride

3. “Listen, don’t meet your heroes. If you meet your heroes, you’re always going to be disappointed.”

— James McBride

4. “Family is the last and greatest discovery. It is our last miracle.”

— James McBride

5. “Educate yourself or you’ll be a nobody!”

— James McBride

6. “As a journalist, the details always tell the story.”

— James McBride

7. “I’m not interested in food. It’s just fuel.”

— James McBride

8. “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

9. “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

10. “Some things in this world just ain’t meant 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

11. “God gived you the seed. But the watering and caring of that seed is up to you.”

— James McBride

12. “So sweet and precious is family life.”

— James McBride

13. “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

14. “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

15. “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

16. “They were all trying hard to be American, you know, not knowing what to keep and what to leave behind. But you know what happens when you do that. If you throw water on the floor it will always find a hole, believe me.”

— James McBride

17. “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

18. “You have to choose between what the world expects of you and what you want for yourself,” my sister Jack told me several times. “Put yourself in God’s hands and you can’t go wrong.”

— James McBride

19. “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

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

— James McBride

21. “It was in her sense of education, more than any other, that Mommy conveyed her Jewishness to us. She admired the way Jewish parents raised their children to be scholastic standouts, insulating them from a potentially harmful and dangerous public school system by clustering together within certain communities, to attend certain schools, to be taught by certain teachers who enforced discipline and encouraged learning, and she followed their lead.”

— James McBride

22. “The question of race was like the power of the moon in my house. It’s what made the river flow, the ocean swell, and the tide rise, but it was a silent power, intractable, indomitable, indisputable, and thus completely ignorable.”

— James McBride

23. “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

24. “The man was the finest preacher. He could make a frog stand up straight and get happy with Jesus.”

— James McBride

25. “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

26. “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

27. “Light is only possible through dialogue between cultures, not through rejection of one or the other.”

— James McBride

28. “I grew up in the church, and so I feel that God gave me certain things to do, and I’m lucky enough to kind of have figured those things out. I just don’t want to die not having tried to help somebody else with what I know.”

— James McBride

29. “She never spoke about Jewish people as white. She spoke about them as Jews, which made them somehow different.”

— James McBride

30. “Writing for me is cutting out the fat and getting to the meaning.”

— James McBride

31. “Like most of the Jews in Suffolk they treated me very kindly, truly warm and welcoming, as if I were one of them which in an odd way I suppose I was. I found it odd and amazing when white people treated me that way, as if there were no barriers between us. It said a lot about this religion – Judaism – that some of its followers, old southern crackers who talked with southern twangs and wore straw hats, seemed to believe that its covenants went beyond the color of one’s skin.”

— James McBride

32. “Nothing in this world happens unless white folks says it happens. The lies they tell each other sound better to them than the truth does when it comes out of our mouths.”

— James McBride

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

— James McBride

34. “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

35. “My whole family was – we grew up in New York, but all my relatives and all my father and stepfather’s family, they were all from the South. So I like that old Black voice, and I love the sort of old Black man with a corncob pipe, sitting there telling a whopper.”

— James McBride

36. “There ain’t no time for foolishness now. You in it now. You got to stay in it.”

— James McBride

37. “Family love: It is firm footing, something to cling to in a frightened world that seems to spin out of control with war, turmoil, terrorism, and uncertainty. It is our highest calling and our greatest nobility.”

— James McBride

38. “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

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

— James McBride

40. “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

41. “My family is my career.”

— James McBride

42. “This is what happens when a boy becomes a man. You get stupider.”

— James McBride

43. “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

44. “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

45. “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

46. “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.””

— James McBride

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

— James McBride

48. “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

49. “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

50. “I put headlights in Ford vans. I still drive a Ford.”

— James McBride