Top 160 James McBride Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

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

— James McBride

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

— James McBride

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

— James McBride

106. “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

107. “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

108. “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

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

— James McBride

110. “Friendship was trouble in business.”

— James McBride

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

— James McBride

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

— James McBride

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

116. “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

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

— James McBride

118. “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

119. “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

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

— James McBride

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

— James McBride

122. “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

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. “The law in this land is what the white man says it is, mister. Plain and simple.”

— James McBride

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

— James McBride

126. “The difference was that the white man in the South spoke his hatred in clear, clean, concise terms, whereas the white man in the new country hid his hatred behind stories of wisdom and bravado, with false smiles of sincerity and stories of Jesus Christ and other nonsense that he tossed about like confetti in the Pottstown parade.”

— James McBride

127. “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

128. “Many a morning the hapless Feldman would find his garbled interpretations of Jewish law amended by the pretty housewife whose sharp Talmudic corrections from behind the curtain fluttered into the air like butterflies as she piped out, “Karl, what are you talking about? There are four different versions of how Cain died!”

— James McBride

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

— James McBride

130. “It ain’t what he’s done to get here, son. It’s what’s inside him. Call it a curse or a devilment. Whatever it is, it lives in some people. There’s not many types like ’em in this world. But Nate’s one of ’em. He got that thing in him, son, deep inside. It’s too bad really, on account of he’s a good man, my kind of man. But a man can’t control what’s in him once it’s turned loose no more than you or I can hold on to a bag of groceries if we was to get hit by a bus.”

— James McBride

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

— James McBride

132. “There was nothing to do but talk, which at times like these is all that’s left.”

— James McBride

133. “It was a future they couldn’t quite see, where the richness of all they had brought to the great land of promise would one day be zapped into nothing, the glorious tapestry of their history boiled down to a series of ten-second TV commercials, empty holidays, and sports games filled with the patriotic fluff of red, white, and blue, the celebrants cheering the accompanying dazzle without any idea of the horrible struggles and proud pasts of their forebears who had made their lives so easy.”

— James McBride

134. “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

135. “They understand what most people in this land don’t: that you can’t restore what you ain’t never had.”

— James McBride

136. “The men grope and the women mope.”

— James McBride

137. “The tiny woman with the bad foot was all soul.”

— James McBride

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

— James McBride

139. “Their illness is honesty, for they live in a world of lies, ruled by those who surrendered all the good things that God gived them for money, living on stolen land, taken from people whose spirits dance all around us like ghosts.”

— James McBride

140. “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

141. “The next four nights were the most extraordinary gathering of joyful Jewish celebration that Moshe had ever seen.”

— James McBride

142. “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

143. “He was a true Jew, a man of ideas and wit who understood the meaning of celebration and music and that the blend of those things meant life itself.”

— James McBride

144. “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

145. “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

146. “Two boys with intelligent minds trapped in bodies that would not cooperate, caged in cribs like toddlers living in an insane asylum... They were cheered by the tiniest of things... It was outrageous. Fortunately, time was something they had a great deal of and they made good use of it.”

— James McBride

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

— James McBride

148. “I’m sure they all walk around holding hands up there,” Irv said.”

— James McBride

149. “The gorgeous cacophony of humanity in wheelchairs, some wearing special eyeglasses, others in hearing aids, signing and gesturing, the winks and chortles and grunts of pleasure, the grimaces and shaking of heads and excited howling of those without ‘normal’ ability. It’s impossible to describe. But it all boils down to the same thing. Love.”

— James McBride

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

— James McBride