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

James McBride Quotes

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

— James McBride

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

Friendship was trouble in business.

— James McBride

My siblings and I spent hours playing tricks and teasing one another. It was our way of dealing with realities over which we had no control.

— James McBride

To the very end, Mommy is a flying compilation of competing interests and conflicts, a black woman in white skin, with black children and a white woman’s physical problem.

— James McBride

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

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

And no resident in their right mind would go over their heads to the mighty Housing Authority honchos in Manhattan, who did not like their afternoon naps disturbed with minor complaints about ants, toilets, murders, child molestation, rape, heatless apartments, and lead paint that shrunk children’s brains to the size of a full-grown pea in one of their Brooklyn locations, unless they wanted a new home sleeping on a bench at the Port Authority Bus Terminal.

— James McBride

For God’s people – all of ’em.

— James McBride

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

— James McBride

But then, she thought, every once in a while there’s a glimmer of hope. Just a blip on the horizon, a whack on the nose of the giant that set him back on his heels or to the canvas, something that said, “Guess what, you so-and-so, I am God’s child. And I. Am. Still. Here.

— James McBride

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

Light is only possible through dialogue between cultures, not through rejection of one or the other.

— James McBride

Rather, she saw it as a place where every act of living was a chance for tikkun olam, to improve the world. The tiny woman with the bad foot was all soul. Big.

— James McBride

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

Chona had smelled not a hot dog but the future, a future in which devices that fit in one’s pocket and went zip, zap, and zilch delivered a danger far more seductive and powerful than any hot dog, a device that children of the future would clamor for and become addicted to, a device that fed them their oppression disguised as free thought.

— James McBride

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

— James McBride

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

— James McBride

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

— James McBride

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
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