Top 150 Marlon James Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Truth is truth and nothing you can do about it even if you hide it, or kill it, or even tell it. It was truth before you open your mouth and say, That there is a true thing.”

— Marlon James

52. “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

53. “I like to believe that everything in my house, from towels all the same colour, to the coffee machine where I press one button, is there just to make my life simple, but I’m realizing that they are all there to make sure I don’t think.”

— Marlon James

54. “With so much leaving your front hole, no wonder you wish for something to enter the back.”

— Marlon James

55. “Drunkenness was a communal and personal pleasure at once, a miserable state only to those not drinking. Sobriety to him was a cruel attack of conscience masking itself as awareness. If sober people were so aware, how come they only spoke truth when drunk? Give him the romance of a drunkard over the indignation of a teetotaler any day.”

— Marlon James

56. “The moon moved in so close she eavesdropped on us.”

— Marlon James

57. “Then coffin, black with silver handles with the dead boy in a black velvet suit. If you’re never gonna sweat why not go out in winter style?”

— Marlon James

58. “Sure good is good, but good is something that nobody know. Good is a ghost. You can’t get pocket money from good. Jamaica better off bad, because that type of bad work.”

— Marlon James

59. “Because every man who fight monster become a monster too, and there be at least one woman in Kingston who think me is the killer of all things name hope. People think me lose it because it bother me that me kill the school boy by mistake, but don’t realize that me losing it because it supposed to bother me but don’t.”

— Marlon James

60. “A lot of women but they are all moving. It takes me a while to see that they are all getting something to give to the men, food, a stool, water, matches for their weed, more food, juice from big Igloos. Livication and liberation my ass, if I wanted to live in a Victorian novel I at least want men who know how to get a decent haircut.”

— Marlon James

61. “Soldiers are fools not paid enough to be fools.”

— Marlon James

62. “Jamaicans are so unflappable, they might as well be Minnesotans.”

— Marlon James

63. “I laugh because me been dancing with shadow in the dawn and in the night. Even in broad, bright daylight we searching for the dark.”

— Marlon James

64. “Homer say, Pretty gal go a river and see herself in water. Pretty gal drown when she go down to kiss herself.”

— Marlon James

65. “Rastaman don’t deal with negativity so oppression is now downpression even though there is no up in the word. Dedicate is livicate, I and I, well God knows what that means, but it sounds like somebody trying for their own holy trinity but forgetting the name of the third person.”

— Marlon James

66. “Papa-Lo start thinking too deep and start thinking that he should be more than what he is. He’s the worst kind of fool, the fool who start believing things can get better.”

— Marlon James

67. “Reason is for rich people. We have madness.”

— Marlon James

68. “You never know when people’s dreams are connected to you before you’re gone and then there’s nothing to do, but watch them die in a different way, slow, limb by limb, system by system.”

— Marlon James

69. “Politicians rise in the east and set in the west and nothing you can change about them.”

— Marlon James

70. “Maybe because is December. After all, only when we come to Revelation that we take stock of Genesis, right?”

— Marlon James

71. “Me love that man to the max. Me would take a bullet for the Singer. But gentlemens, me can only take one.”

— Marlon James

72. “Nobody ever own a gun. You don’t know that until you own one.”

— Marlon James

73. “My mother is so afraid of trouble that trouble sticks to her close just because he never gets tired of proving a point.”

— Marlon James

74. “Nyka was like a man coming back from things I was yet to go through.”

— Marlon James

75. “I want her to look at me and smile just to show that she knows that I know that she knows.”

— Marlon James

76. “Nobody in the game uses their feet, but it’s football. I love how Americans can just claim something to be whatever they feel it is, despite clear evidence it’s not. Like a football game with nobody using any feet that takes forever.”

— Marlon James

77. “Now he is a man who could talk to God and the devil and make them work they difference – as long as neither of them have a woman.”

— Marlon James

78. “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

79. “Learn this, all nice and decent people. An election year commence as soon as the first gunshot buss.”

— Marlon James

80. “The child is dead. There is nothing left to know.”

— Marlon James

81. “Because every man who fight monster become a monster too, and there be at least one woman in Kingston who think me is the killer of all things name hope.”

— Marlon James

82. “But sometimes when you’re too careful it just turns into a different kind of carelessness. It’s not that either. 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.”

— Marlon James

83. “I let the half-blind man live because we need stories in order to live, don’t we, priest? Inquisitor. I don’t know what to call you.”

— Marlon James

84. “It’s not the actual crime that makes me want to leave, it’s the possibility that it can happen any time, any second now, even in the next minute. That it might never happen at all, but I’ll think it will happen any second now for the next ten years.”

— Marlon James

85. “And Smoke Girl. He who was mine said, One of them must have a name from where I come from. One must remind me of me. So he named Smoke Grl Khamseen, for the wind that blows fifty days.”

— Marlon James

86. “Only a matter of time before you make enemies as ruthless as you, after all you’re the one raising the bar.”

— Marlon James

87. “You could have a family of one and still drive them apart.”

— Marlon James

88. “I am content with much. This world never gives me anything, and yet I have everything I want.”

— Marlon James

89. “Soldier don’t act like we is crime and them is order, soldier act like we is enemy and this is war.”

— Marlon James

90. “Shiny like new zinc holding up a roof or a fence right beside old zinc, the material itself a living history of when last the politician did the ghetto a favor.”

— Marlon James

91. “My mother sings One day at a time sweet Jesus, and even Daddy likes to say that, one day at a time, as if it’s some strategy for living. And yet the quickest way to not live at all is to take life one day at a time.”

— Marlon James

92. “Last month a shipment on the wharf just disappear. Not long after that freelance bad boy have machine gun, M16, M9 and Glock, and nobody can account for where they come from. Woman breed baby, but man can only make Frankenstein.”

— Marlon James

93. “In my lands night is where people to evil to enemies they call friends in the day. It’s when sihrs and jinns come play, and people scheme and plot. Children grow to fear it because they think there be monsters. They build a whole thing about it, about night and dark and even the colour black, which is not even a colour here. Not here. Here evil has no qualm with striking at noon. But it leaves night beautiful in look and cool of feel.”

— Marlon James

94. “I swear to God I can’t remember when I had a handbag. I know for some woman it’s like an eleventh finger and you don’t even think about it, even if you change every day. But I can’t remember the handbag either. Who can run with a handbag?”

— Marlon James

95. “Look at this leper accusing another leper of leprosy.”

— Marlon James

96. “I never miss the country not even once. I hate nostalgia. Nostalgia is not memory and my memory is too damn good for it.”

— Marlon James

97. “Listen. Dead people never stop talking. Maybe because death is not death at all, just a detention after school. You know where you’re coming from and you’re always returning from it. You know where you’re going though you never seem to get there and you’re just dead. Dead.”

— Marlon James

98. “Plenty people even in the middle of sufferation going pick the bad they know over the good they can only dream about, because who dream but madman and fool?”

— Marlon James

99. “I want to lie down in the grass on the sidewalk and I want to run and keep running.”

— Marlon James

100. “How do you bury a man? Put him in the ground or stomp out his fire? They give the Singer an honour on his deathbed, the Order of Merit. The black revolutionary joins the order of British Squires and Knights, Babylon in excelsis deo. A fire that lights up Zimbabwe, Angola, Mozambique and South Africa doused out by two letters, O and M.”

— Marlon James