Top 150 Marlon James Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 3 of 4

101. “Go to Hanover and take a name like Everton or Courtney or Fitzharold, a name that sound like both mother and father raise me.”

— Marlon James

102. “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

103. “When dog kill puss, and puss kill dog, the only one happy is the john-crow.”

— Marlon James

104. “Racism here is sour and sticky, but it goes down so smooth that you’re tempted to be racist with a Jamaican just to see if they would even get it.”

— Marlon James

105. “Everybody lives in their own Jamaica and damn if that was ever going to be mine.”

— Marlon James

106. “Nineteen seventy-six come and bring an election with it. The man who bring guns to the ghetto made it clear, that there is no way that socialist government should win again.”

— Marlon James

107. “Gun weight is a different kind of weight. Or maybe it be something else, a feeling that whenever you hold a gun is really the gun holding you.”

— Marlon James

108. “Some man never get the woman who cure them from looking for another woman.”

— Marlon James

109. “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. Heart condition, diabetes, slow-killing diseases with slow-sounding names. This is the body going over to death with impatience, one part at a time.”

— Marlon James

110. “What really boils me blood is that it’s not that Daddy didn’t have money, but he never could think of a single good reason to spend it.”

— Marlon James

111. “The car is hopping over bumps, jumping, tearing, screeching. The green car in sight, out of sight, vanishing around a corner only to appear when I skate around, behind three or four cars. God, I hope he’s not trying to lose me. I almost said “give me the slip.” I could feel it coming but I didn’t.”

— Marlon James

112. “The problem with a book is that you never know what its planning to you do with you until you are too far into it.”

— Marlon James

113. “Jah know, sometimes I don’t learn till too late, and to know something too late? Well is better you never know as my mother used to say. 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. So.”

— Marlon James

114. “Police only have to see that me don’t have no shoes before he say what the bloodcloth you nasty naiggers doing ’round decent people, and give me two choices.”

— Marlon James

115. “The white man say we’re fighting for freedom from totalitarianism, terrorism and tyranny, but nobody know what he mean. I.”

— Marlon James

116. “Something happen when somebody tell you something about yourself even if you already know.”

— Marlon James

117. “Preacher says there is a god-shaped void in everybody life but the only thing ghetto people can fill a void with is void.”

— Marlon James

118. “Jesus Superman Spiderman Captain America stare hard and superpower goin’ come superpower.”

— Marlon James

119. “I hate that just because I live here I’m supposed to live politics. And there’s nothing you can do. If you don’t live politics, politics will leave you.”

— Marlon James

120. “Then I wondered if everybody has that person that haunts them, the one that got away.”

— Marlon James

121. “They turned over the reception desk and the poor security guards did the only thing they could do. They ran.”

— Marlon James

122. “The problem with proving something is that instead of leaving you alone people never stop giving you new things to prove, harder things.”

— Marlon James

123. “I didn’t tell him that be on top is to worry. Once you climb to the peak of the mountain, the whole world can take a shot. I know the Singer know that plenty people hate him, but I wonder if he know what shape that hate take.”

— Marlon James

124. “Can people do that? Can people want to be with someone all the time, okay most of the time and yet also wish they were alone? And not in little compartments but at once? At the same time? All the time? I want to be alone but I need not to be.”

— Marlon James

125. “But he starting to confuse representing people with owning them, and soon even he going need a reckoning.”

— Marlon James

126. “All you ever did was watch woman suffer and blame her for it.”

— Marlon James

127. “All the time she’s silent. All the women were silent except the white one talking to Trent. If it wasn’t for the red, green and gold and that the skirts are often denim, I’d think I was surrounded by Muslim women.”

— Marlon James

128. “Before you see the monkey, the monkey has seen you.”

— Marlon James

129. “He will live to see them make him a national hero and he will die the only person thinking he had failed. That’s what happens when you personify hopes and dreams in one person.”

— Marlon James

130. “I see the calm and hear the calm and know the calm can’t last. Not for me, not for him, not for Kingston, not for Jamaica. For.”

— Marlon James

131. “He said he had evidence that the Company was giving the opposition party money, which was just preposterous considering what bad form it would have been, trusting anybody in the Third World with money.”

— Marlon James

132. “Devil has his part to play.”

— Marlon James

133. “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

134. “Meanwhile, I watch and work up my rage at men, who can be villainous to all, but virtuous to some. Watching them be kind to children should make me think of them as better men, but it make them worse, for no other wicked is more wicked than choosing with who you dole out kindness.”

— Marlon James

135. “Everybody know that condom and birth control was white man scheme to kill off black people, but he don’t care.”

— Marlon James

136. “Miss Betsy is looking at me. Some jealousy sure, but every woman have that in them.”

— Marlon James

137. “Then the white man talk about how some people trying to use smooth talk to win people over and how totalitarianism always happens with consent and we nod like we understand.”

— Marlon James

138. “No thought is wise just because you have it, girl.”

— Marlon James

139. “Weeper stare at me hard then laugh. Nothing like a Weeper laugh, it start like a wheeze then somewhere, and you never know where, it explode into the biggest thing in the room. Who teach this little black man that he can laugh so?”

— Marlon James

140. “Louis Johnson still don’t really believe I can read, which might be why he keep showing me grocery list upside down and saying it’s a classified document.”

— Marlon James

141. “This is the thing about redheads, isn’t it? No matter how long you’ve lived with them, you’re always surprised when they turn and look straight at you.”

— Marlon James

142. “He say how the country will thanks us one day and we nod like we understand. But.”

— Marlon James

143. “What a day when a man tell me what to do.”

— Marlon James

144. “Gun Court lockup. He would still be there if Daddy didn’t.”

— Marlon James

145. “This Singer think because he come from where we come from that he understand how we live. But he don’t understand nothing. Everybody think the way him think when they leave and come back. That everything was exactly how they leave it. But we different. We harder than him and we don’t care. He flee before you turn into something like we. And.”

— Marlon James

146. “They like him better when he was the poor cousin that they can feel good for taking notice. I tell him that politician do the same thing to me when they realize me can read.”

— Marlon James

147. “Kimmy’s not really talking to you. She only needs a witness, not an audience.”

— Marlon James

148. “And yet the quickest way to not live at all is to take life one day at a time. It’s the way I’ve discovered to not do a damn thing.”

— Marlon James

149. “When I finally die, at the hand of the Duolingon, how many runes will you have to write each night to stop me from coming for you?”

— Marlon James

150. “And all I could think of is Oh Lord here it comes, another white man about to tell me about how much he enjoyed Ocho Rios, but would have enjoyed it so much more if it weren’t for all the poverty. And the country is so beatiful and the people so friendly and even in all this tragedy everybody still manages a smile especially the bombor’asscloth children.”

— Marlon James