Top 140 James McBride Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I didn’t make head nor tails of what he was saying, for I was to learn that Old John Brown could work the Lord into just about any aspect of his comings and goings in life, including using the privy. That’s one reason I weren’t a believer, having been raised by my Pa, who was a believer and a lunatic, and them things seemed to run together.”

— James McBride

52. “Until you expose the cancer, you can’t fix it.”

— James McBride

53. “The question of religion in black America is something filmmakers don’t want to touch.”

— James McBride

54. “It occurred to me then that you is everything you are in this life at every moment.”

— James McBride

55. “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

56. “Be kind to the living.”

— James McBride

57. “Newt Gingrich wrote a novel, and he’s a short story. Bill Clinton wrote a biography, and he’s a novel.”

— James McBride

58. “If you have the material it will form itself as a kind of connective tissue.”

— James McBride

59. “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

60. “I think a lot of the history we’ve read up to this point, some of it is just off. It’s written with the same prejudice that certain networks have when they report the news of the day.”

— James McBride

61. “It took years before I began to accept the fact that the nebulous “white man’s world” wasn’t as free as it looked; that class, luck, religion all factored in as well; that many white individuals’ problems surpassed my own, often by a lot; that all Jews are not like my grandfather and that part of me is Jewish too. Yet the color boundary in my mind was and still is the greatest hurdle. In order to clear it, my solution was to stay away from it and fly solo.”

— James McBride

62. “I wouldn’t throw her outta bed for eating crackers. She was all class.”

— James McBride

63. “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

64. “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

65. “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

66. “Everybody went to jail in the Cause eventually. You could be the tiniest ant able to slip into a crack in the sidewalk, or a rocket ship that flew fast enough to break the speed of sound, it didn’t matter. When society dropped its hammer on your head, well, there it is.”

— James McBride

67. “The black church will accept anybody.”

— James McBride

68. “He said he loved Blue. He said he loved the evil in Blue. He loves the evil in all people. Because in loving their evil, he loves the evil in himself enough to surrender it to God, who washes it clean. He’s loving what God made, is what he said.”

— James McBride

69. “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

70. “God was forever generous with His gifts: hope, love, truth, and the belief in the indestructability of the good in all people.”

— James McBride

71. “You ain’t got to worry about your skin.” “I do worries about my skin. It covers my body.”

— James McBride

72. “Rather, she saw it as a place where every act of living was a chance for tikkun olam, to improve the world. The tiny woman with the bad foot was all soul. Big.”

— James McBride

73. “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

74. “If I ever see you again, I’ll send your ass hooting and hollering out my damn door.”

— James McBride

75. “Most cars drove through there because the drivers is either from The Bottom and wanna get home – or they ain’t from The Bottom and wanna get home in one piece.”

— James McBride

76. “Isn’t it something,” Hettie said softly, “what ol’ New York really is? We come here to be free and find life’s worse here than back home. The white folks here just color it different. They don’t mind you sitting next to ’em on the subway, or riding the bus in the front seat, but if you asks for the same pay, or wants to live next door, or get so beat down you don’t wanna stand up and sing about how great America is, they’ll bust down on you so hard pus’ll come out your ears.”

— James McBride

77. “Ain’t no worse thing in the world than fronting up against one of those, for a man with a cause, right or wrong, has got plenty to prove, and will make you suck sorrow if you get in the way of ’em wrongly.”

— James McBride

78. “Most times I don’t know what I’m doing. Sometimes I feel like I don’t hardly know enough to tie my own shoes.”

— James McBride

79. “My siblings and I spent hours playing tricks and teasing one another. It was our way of dealing with realities over which we had no control.”

— James McBride

80. “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

81. “She does her hair in an Afro like Cicely Tyson, that famous actress I seen on TV once, or Angela Davis, who I don’t know exactly who she is but they say she’s got guts and ain’t scared of white people.”

— James McBride

82. “Chona had smelled not a hot dog but the future, a future in which devices that fit in one’s pocket and went zip, zap, and zilch delivered a danger far more seductive and powerful than any hot dog, a device that children of the future would clamor for and become addicted to, a device that fed them their oppression disguised as free thought.”

— James McBride

83. “He felt like a radio tuning in to a new channel, one that was beginning to fuzz into range, slowly coming in clear, proper, the way his Hettie had always wanted him to be. The new feeling humbled him.”

— James McBride

84. “When society dropped its hammer on your head, well, there it is. Soup.”

— James McBride

85. “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

86. “There ain’t nothing gets a Yankee madder than a smart colored person, of which I reckon they figured there was only one in the world, Mr. Douglass.”

— James McBride

87. “What hair she had looked like scrambled eggs in string form, in wild clumps and in single strands, giving her the appearance of a wired, harried, ancient, terrified professor.”

— James McBride

88. “Man hates. Animals don’t hate. You been in the zoo too long, Rubs. Who could hate old Rubs? Hate you because you’re scared of something? We’re all scared of something, Rubs. Just remember every fear that lives inside makes you smaller. But when you air your fears, they disappear.” “How’s that?”

— James McBride

89. “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

90. “Is this what love does? It changes you this way? It allows you to see the past this clearly?”

— James McBride

91. “Son, a blessing favors them that needs it. Don’t matter how it comes. It just matters that it does.”

— James McBride

92. “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

93. “He didn’t look mad, but he didn’t look like Martin Luther King neither.”

— James McBride

94. “So he drinks and grows plants and goes to church,” Potts said. “So far, he sounds Catholic.”

— James McBride

95. “To the very end, Mommy is a flying compilation of competing interests and conflicts, a black woman in white skin, with black children and a white woman’s physical problem.”

— James McBride

96. “He’s a drunk. One of those guys who dies at twenty and is buried at eighty.”

— James McBride

97. “Nothing in the world is normal,” he said. “I can’t understand why you’d even hope for that.” His comment sent the anger hissing out of her like a balloon, and her features softened. She eyed him with curiosity, then wiped the edge of her eye with the back of her hand and shifted her weight.”

— James McBride

98. “But then, she thought, every once in a while there’s a glimmer of hope. Just a blip on the horizon, a whack on the nose of the giant that set him back on his heels or to the canvas, something that said, “Guess what, you so-and-so, I am God’s child. And I. Am. Still. Here.”

— James McBride

99. “Her smile displayed a raw, natural beauty that caught Potts off guard. The woman, he thought, was all good handwriting.”

— James McBride

100. “Just because you toast marshmallows with a kid on a camping trip doesn’t mean he’ll become a Boy Scout.”

— James McBride