Top 150 Marlon James Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Nobody loves no one.”

— Marlon James

2. “Not everything the eye sees should be spoken by the mouth.”

— Marlon James

3. “I don’t believe in belief.”

— Marlon James

4. “Bad feeling is a country no woman want to visit. So they take good feeling any which way it come. Sometime that good feeling come by taking on a different kind of bad feeling.”

— Marlon James

5. “I hate people like that, people you have to protect while they keep hurting you.”

— Marlon James

6. “If you lived all your life with monsters, what was monstrous?”

— Marlon James

7. “If it no go so, it go near so. – Jamaican proverb.”

— Marlon James

8. “When building monsters don’t be surprised when they become monstrous.”

— Marlon James

9. “But sometimes when you’re too careful it just turns into a different kind of carelessness.”

— Marlon James

10. “For you to say that sadness is not the absence of happiness, but the opposite of it.”

— Marlon James

11. “That’s what happens when you personify hopes and dreams in one person. He becomes nothing more than a literary device.”

— Marlon James

12. “You ever feel like home is the one place you can’t go back to? It’s like you promise yourself when you got out of bed and combed your hair that this evening, when I get back I’ll be a different woman in a new place. And now you can’t go back because the house expects something from you.”

— Marlon James

13. “Hate and love be closer cousin than like and dislike.”

— Marlon James

14. “This is the first mistake God make. Time. God was a fool to create time. It’s the one thing that even he run out of. But me beyond time. Me in the now, which is now which is also then. Then is also soon and soon might as well be if.”

— Marlon James

15. “A man will suffer misery to get to the bottom of truth, but he will not suffer boredom.”

— Marlon James

16. “The dream didn’t leave, people just don’t know a nightmare when they right in the middle of one.”

— Marlon James

17. “But she didn’t say it, she sing it so we know that it’s you. And plenty in the ghetto, in Copenhagen City, in Rema, and for sure in the Eight Lanes sing it too. The two men who bring guns to the ghetto don’t know what to do since when music hit you can’t hit it back.”

— Marlon James

18. “I think that’s what Toni Morrison and Alice Walker understand, the secret language of women. That it’s not a secret at all; men just don’t know how to listen.”

— Marlon James

19. “People who say they don’t have a choice just too coward to choose.”

— Marlon James

20. “Everything in the world cooks down to two. Either- or, if-then, yes-no, night-day, good-bad. You all believe in twos so much I wonder if any of you can count to three.”

— Marlon James

21. “When kings fall they fall on top of us.”

— Marlon James

22. “Dead people never stop talking.”

— Marlon James

23. “Better to be with the ancestors than to live bonded to somebody else, who might be kind, who might be cruel, who might even make you master to many slaves of your own, but was still master over you.”

— Marlon James

24. “Seem that if baby get left in manger he would scratch up, bite up and dead by the third day. But white people think this be the greatest thing. The baby grow up and they kill him, and white people think this be even greater. It make plenty sense that white people would get so much mirth and joy out of this ’cause nobody kill for fun like backra.”

— Marlon James

25. “Living people wait and see because they fool themselves that they have time. Dead people see and wait.”

— Marlon James

26. “Dead. It sounds final but it’s a word missing an ing.”

— Marlon James

27. “Is true, you do feel better about things the further you run from it.”

— Marlon James

28. “Gorgon say that Callisto was a woman who laugh all her life but never smile once.”

— Marlon James

29. “Write about only three things: what you love, what you hate, and what you’re deeply conflicted about.”

— Marlon James

30. “But some fire don’t go out, they go quiet under the ash, waiting for one little dry stick to feed. So the white man sleep with one eye open, waiting for the fire next time. That fire coming.”

— Marlon James

31. “When you come into the real truth about yourself, you realize that the only person equipped to handle it is you. Some men can’t even handle that, which is why Bellevue always full.”

— Marlon James

32. “The hippopotamus is invisible in water.”

— Marlon James

33. “He is my friend.” “Nobody ever gets betrayed by their enemy.”

— Marlon James

34. “Woman breed baby, but man can only make Frankenstein.”

— Marlon James

35. “You’ll be asking of love next,” he said. “Well, do you have love for the man, and does the man love you?” He looked straight at me. Either he just grew whiskers, or I just saw them. “Nobody loves no one,” he said. He turned away and nodded at the tree.”

— Marlon James

36. “Sometimes war stop because you forget why you fight, sometimes you tired of warring, sometimes people who dead come back to you in you sleep and you can’t remember them name, and sometimes you come to see that who you supposed to fight not even your enemy.”

— Marlon James

37. “People with a plan see and wait for the right time.”

— Marlon James

38. “Being a fool is a curse too.”

— Marlon James

39. “But in another city, another valley, another ghetto, another slum, another favela, another township, another intifada, another war, another birth, somebody is singing Redemption Song, as if the Singer wrote it for no other reason but for this sufferah to sing, shout, whisper, weep, bawl, and scream right here, right now.”

— Marlon James

40. “I have a theory that while a man might not always get the wife he wants or needs, he always gets the wife he deserves.”

— Marlon James

41. “You ever see a man who doesn’t know he’s unhappy, Leopard? Look for it in the scars on his woman’s face. Or in the excellence of his woodcraft and iron making, or in the masks he makes to wear himself because he forbids the world to see his own face. I am not happy, Leopard. But I am not unhappy that I know.”

— Marlon James

42. “Life is love and I have no love left. Love has drained itself from me, and run to a river like this one.”

— Marlon James

43. “Killing don’t need no reason. This is ghetto. Reason is for rich people. We have madness.”

— Marlon James

44. “You think as they do that suffering from cruelty or escaping it is a matter of choice or means, when it is matter of power.”

— Marlon James

45. “Worse, you all present tense and have to deal with sudden past tense all around you. It’s like realizing somebody rob you a year late.”

— Marlon James

46. “I tell myself that I tolerate Kimmy because she could never survive me even once talking to her the way she talks to me. I hate people like that, people you have to protect while they keep hurting you.”

— Marlon James

47. “Those who think he had lucky breaks are not only unaware of the real story but also fall prey to that sin of the mediocre: bitchiness about others’ success.”

— Marlon James

48. “He’s from a generation that never even expected to get midway up the ladder so when he got there he was too stunned to dare climb higher. That’s the problem with midway. Up is everything and down just means all the white people want to party on your street on Sunday night to feel realness. Midway is nowhere.”

— Marlon James

49. “Can’t play it safe when nowhere safe anymore.”

— Marlon James

50. “Something else that her mind answer before the question ask. She know the answer. She can’t help nobody out of white man power, not even herself. The woman eye still asking. Lilith don’t know how to fix her eye to say no, so she look at the man and the same question come over him face.”

— Marlon James