Top 140 James McBride Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “A man who doesn’t trust cannot be trusted.”

— James McBride

102. “Anytime he said something about the will of God, it meant he weren’t going to cooperate or do nothing but as he saw fit. He had no intentions of leaving Kansas Territory or turning himself in or paying attention to what any white soldier told him. He would tell a fib in a minute to help his cause. 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

103. “He ain’t dead. They say just his ear’s shot off.” “That don’t sound like me. It ain’t smart to shoot a man’s ear off. A man ain’t got but two.”

— James McBride

104. “Son, you looks like a character witness for a nightmare. You ugly enough to have your face capped.” “We can’t all be pretty,” he grumbled. “Well, you ain’t no gemstone, son. You got a face for swim trunk ads.” “I’m seventy-one, Sister Paul. I’m a spring chicken compared to you. I don’t see no mens doing backflips at the door over you. At least I ain’t got enough wrinkles in my face to hold ten days of rain.”

— James McBride

105. “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

106. “I think he was a gangster.” “Why you say that?” Miss Izi asked. “He had a lot of pockmarks on his face.” “That’s nothing,” Miss Izi said. “That could be from learning to use a fork.”

— James McBride

107. “The bands were horrible outfits that sounded like owls hooting. Moshe watched in puzzlement as these Americans danced with clumsy satisfaction at the moans and groans of these boneless, noise-producing junk mongers, their boring humpty-dumpty sounds landing on the dance floor with all the power of empty peanut shells tossed in the air.”

— James McBride

108. “She smiled bitterly, and once again the mask she wore so well, the firm lady of strong, impatient indifference whom he’d met when he first walked into the church a week before, broke apart, revealing the vulnerable, lonely soul underneath. She’s just like me, he thought in wonder. She’s as lost as I am.”

— James McBride

109. “My brothers and sisters were my best friends, but when it came to food, they were my enemies.”

— James McBride

110. “You mean the nice little white man who sings? With the puppets?” “That’s Mister Rogers’s address. One forty-three. You know what one forty-three means?” “No, Soup.” His stoic face folded into a smile. “I would tell you, but I don’t wanna spoil it.”

— James McBride

111. “In four months, he had become a living embodiment of l’chaim, a toast to life. A.”

— James McBride

112. “But pretending to know everything and acting like you’re better than you know you are puts a terrible strain on a body. It makes you a stumbling stone to your own justice.”

— James McBride

113. “The Old Man was a lunatic, but he was a good, kind lunatic, and he couldn’t no more be a sane man in his transactions with his fellow white man than you and I can bark like a dog, for he didn’t speak their language. He was a Bible man. A God man. Crazy as a bedbug. Pure to the truth, which will drive any man off his rocker. But at least he knowed he was crazy. At least he knowed who he was. That’s more than I could say for myself.”

— James McBride

114. “Deacon Cuffy Lambkins of Five Ends Baptist Church became a walking dead man on a cloudy September afternoon in 1969.”

— James McBride

115. “So many of God’s dangers, he thought, are not the gifts they appear to be.”

— James McBride

116. “You’ve got to be strong to get old.”

— James McBride

117. “The woman, he thought, was all good handwriting.”

— James McBride

118. “Friendship was trouble in business.”

— James McBride

119. “It sat proudly atop the hill behind wrought-iron gates, with smooth lawns, tennis courts, and shiny classroom buildings, a monstrous bastion of arrogant elegance, glowing like a phoenix above the ramshackle neighborhood of Chicken Hill.”

— James McBride

120. “I played it for myself many times, thinking, wishing, hoping that the world would be this open-minded, knowing that God.”

— James McBride

121. “A man ain’t got to stand in church every Sunday to do God’s work.”

— James McBride

122. “To not take sides was to take sides.”

— James McBride

123. “White folks got insane after the Old Man done his bit, they went on a rampage and attacked coloreds for miles. They was scared outta their minds. I reckon in some fashion, they ain’t been the same since.”

— James McBride

124. “He leaned on the church wall and gave his heart a moment to catch itself.”

— James McBride

125. “Why we got to have the police around every time we has a simple party? Ya’ll don’t watch out for us. Y’all watch over us. I don’t see y’all out there standing over the white folks in Park Slope when they has their block parties.”

— James McBride

126. “Nothing in this world is dangerous unless white folks says it is,” she said flatly. “Danger here. Danger there. We don’t need you to tell us about danger in these projects. We don’t need you to say what the world is to us.”

— James McBride

127. “I been around the sun one hundred four whole times and nobody’s explained nothing to me.”

— James McBride

128. “I read the book on not being explained to. That’s called being an old colored woman, sir.”

— James McBride

129. “The Star-Spangled Banner,’” she scoffed. “I never did like that old lying, lollygagging, hypocritical, warring-ass drinking song. With the bombs bursting in air and so forth.”

— James McBride

130. “Why she got to be bowlegged?” “I do got standards.”

— James McBride

131. “Giving words to ideas was too dangerous in their world. When Poppa did give words to something, though, it was for a reason. It had weight.”

— James McBride

132. “Whenever they feel like working, they sit and wait till the feeling passes.”

— James McBride

133. “As Sausage recounted it in the basement that night, it was as if her own future were being revealed, unrolling itself before her like a carpet, one whose design and weave changed as it stretched out ahead.”

— James McBride

134. “Instead, she threw her head back and laughed, displaying a mouth full of gums and one sole yellow tooth, which stood out like a clump of butter on a plate.”

— James McBride

135. “He saw now she was not just handsome, but rather had a quiet, cumulative beauty. She was a tall woman, middle-aged, whose face was not etched with the stern lines of church folks who’ve seen too much and done little about it other than pray.”

— James McBride

136. “As he sat before the elderly Irishman in his boxcar, the moment of realization suddenly tumbled into Elefante’s consciousness with startling efficiency, landing on his insides with a heaviness that felt like a blacksmith’s hammer falling on an anvil.”

— James McBride

137. “Booze, he thought. I chose booze over my Moonflower.”

— James McBride

138. “In that moment he realized that all the experience of thirty-two years on the NYPD and all the formal police training in the world was useless when the smile of someone you suddenly care about finds the bow that wraps your heart and undoes it.”

— James McBride

139. “Well, I reckon to really understand the world, you got to die at least once.”

— James McBride

140. “For God’s people – all of ’em.”

— James McBride

141. “There was something about him that glistened, something warm that churned and billowed about, like a smoke cloud filled with sparklers.”

— James McBride