Quotes from A Brief History of Seven Killings

“And killing don’t need no reason. This is ghetto. Reason is for rich people. We have madness.”
― Marlon James, quote from A Brief History of Seven Killings

“If it no go so, it go near so. —Jamaican proverb”
― Marlon James, quote from A Brief History of Seven Killings

“The dream didn’t leave, people just don’t know a nightmare when they right in the middle of one.”
― Marlon James, quote from A Brief History of Seven Killings

“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, quote from A Brief History of Seven Killings

“But sometimes when you’re too careful it just turns into a different kind of carelessness.”
― Marlon James, quote from A Brief History of Seven Killings

“—The problem with a book is that you never know what it’s planning to do to you until you’re too far into it.”
― Marlon James, quote from A Brief History of Seven Killings

“That’s what happens when you personify hopes and dreams in one person. He becomes nothing more than a literary device.”
― Marlon James, quote from A Brief History of Seven Killings

“One of the things I fucking hate about my fellow Americans: whenever they fly to a foreign country, first thing they do, they try to find as much of America as they can get their hands on, even if it's food in the shitty cafeteria.”
― Marlon James, quote from A Brief History of Seven Killings

“because people so poor that they can’t even afford shame and I wait.”
― Marlon James, quote from A Brief History of Seven Killings

“You know, most of this feminism business was nothing more than white American women telling non-white women what to do and how to do it, with this patronizing if-you-become-just-like-me-you’ll-be-free bullshit,”
― Marlon James, quote from A Brief History of Seven Killings

“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. It’s the way I’ve discovered to not do a damn thing. If you can break a day down into quarters, then hours, then half hours, then minutes, you can chew down any stretch of time to bite size. It’s like dealing with losing a man. If you can bear it for one minute, then you can swallow two, then five, then another five and on and on. If I don’t want to think about my life, I don’t have to think about life at all, just hold for one minute, then two, then five, then another five, before you know it, a month can pass and you don’t even notice because you’ve only been counting minutes.”
― Marlon James, quote from A Brief History of Seven Killings

“Living people wait and see because they fool themselves that they have time. Dead people see and wait.”
― Marlon James, quote from A Brief History of Seven Killings

“Woman breed baby, but man can only make Frankenstein.”
― Marlon James, quote from A Brief History of Seven Killings

“People who say they don’t have a choice just too coward to choose.”
― Marlon James, quote from A Brief History of Seven Killings

“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, quote from A Brief History of Seven Killings

“Jamaica never gets worse or better, it just finds new ways to stay the same.”
― Marlon James, quote from A Brief History of Seven Killings

“I hate people like that, people you have to protect while they keep hurting you.”
― Marlon James, quote from A Brief History of Seven Killings

“There’s a reason why the story of the ghetto should never come with a photo. The Third World slum is a nightmare that defies beliefs or facts, even the ones staring right at you. A vision of hell that twists and turns on itself and grooves to its own soundtrack. Normal rules do not apply here. Imagination then, dream, fantasy. You visit a ghetto, particularly a ghetto in West Kingston, and it immediately leaves the real to become this sort of grotesque, something out of Dante or the infernal painting of Hieronymus Bosch. It’s a rusty red chamber of hell that cannot be described so I will not try to describe it. It cannot be photographed because some parts of West Kingston, such as Rema, are in the grip of such bleak and unremitting repulsiveness that the inherent beauty of the photographic process will lie to you about just how ugly it really is.”
― Marlon James, quote from A Brief History of Seven Killings

“Nobody ever own a gun. You don’t know that until you own one.”
― Marlon James, quote from A Brief History of Seven Killings

“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, quote from A Brief History of Seven Killings

“When building monsters don't be surprised when they become monstrous.”
― Marlon James, quote from A Brief History of Seven Killings

“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, quote from A Brief History of Seven Killings

“—Do you know what we mean by Cold War?
—War don’t have no temperature.”
― Marlon James, quote from A Brief History of Seven Killings

“Is true, you do feel better about things the further you run from it”
― Marlon James, quote from A Brief History of Seven Killings

“every time you reach the edge, the edge move ahead of you like a shadow until the whole world is a ghetto, and you wait.”
― Marlon James, quote from A Brief History of Seven Killings

“People stupid. The dream didn't leave, people just don't know a nightmare when they right in the middle of one.”
― Marlon James, quote from A Brief History of Seven Killings

“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, quote from A Brief History of Seven Killings

“I might be a snob, but at least I’m not a hypocrite, still coasting around because I have nothing to do now that my life’s dream to fuck and breed for Che Guevara blew up in my face. Nor am I hanging out with rich people in West Kings House who now don’t wash their hair and calling themselves I-man to upset their parents, when everybody knows in two years they’re going right back to their father’s shipping company to take it over, and marry whichever Syrian bitch just win Miss Jamaica.”
― Marlon James, quote from A Brief History of Seven Killings

“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, quote from A Brief History of Seven Killings

“I see seven people in one room and one pregnant and people fucking anyway because people so poor that they can’t even afford shame and I wait”
― Marlon James, quote from A Brief History of Seven Killings

About the author

Popular quotes

“I smiled at these books every time I saw them on my shelves. In many ways I sill feel like an incomplete person, but at least I had those books; I was more complete than anyone unlucky enough not to have them.”
― Josh Hanagarne, quote from The World's Strongest Librarian: A Memoir of Tourette's, Faith, Strength, and the Power of Family

“The history of black workers in the United States illustrates the point. As already noted, from the late nineteenth-century on through the middle of the twentieth century, the labor force participation rate of American blacks was slightly higher than that of American whites. In other words, blacks were just as employable at the wages they received as whites were at their very different wages. The minimum wage law changed that. Before federal minimum wage laws were instituted in the 1930s, the black unemployment rate was slightly lower than the white unemployment rate in 1930. But then followed the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931, the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938—all of which imposed government-mandated minimum wages, either on a particular sector or more broadly. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which promoted unionization, also tended to price black workers out of jobs, in addition to union rules that kept blacks from jobs by barring them from union membership. The National Industrial Recovery Act raised wage rates in the Southern textile industry by 70 percent in just five months and its impact nationwide was estimated to have cost blacks half a million jobs. While this Act was later declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 was upheld by the High Court and became the major force establishing a national minimum wage. As already noted, the inflation of the 1940s largely nullified the effect of the Fair Labor Standards Act, until it was amended in 1950 to raise minimum wages to a level that would have some actual effect on current wages. By 1954, black unemployment rates were double those of whites and have continued to be at that level or higher. Those particularly hard hit by the resulting unemployment have been black teenage males. Even though 1949—the year before a series of minimum wage escalations began—was a recession year, black teenage male unemployment that year was lower than it was to be at any time during the later boom years of the 1960s. The wide gap between the unemployment rates of black and white teenagers dates from the escalation of the minimum wage and the spread of its coverage in the 1950s. The usual explanations of high unemployment among black teenagers—inexperience, less education, lack of skills, racism—cannot explain their rising unemployment, since all these things were worse during the earlier period when black teenage unemployment was much lower. Taking the more normal year of 1948 as a basis for comparison, black male teenage unemployment then was less than half of what it would be at any time during the decade of the 1960s and less than one-third of what it would be in the 1970s. Unemployment among 16 and 17-year-old black males was no higher than among white males of the same age in 1948. It was only after a series of minimum wage escalations began that black male teenage unemployment not only skyrocketed but became more than double the unemployment rates among white male teenagers. In the early twenty-first century, the unemployment rate for black teenagers exceeded 30 percent. After the American economy turned down in the wake of the housing and financial crises, unemployment among black teenagers reached 40 percent.”
― Thomas Sowell, quote from Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy

“The perfect way is only difficult for those who pick and choose. Do not like, do not dislike; all will then be clear. Make a hairbreadth difference and heaven and earth are set apart; if you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between “for” and “against” is the mind’s worst disease.”
― Bruce Lee, quote from Tao of Jeet Kune Do

“I’d never met anyone like him before. Every rule I’d ever learned, he was breaking; everything I’d been taught to hide away, he announced it out loud.”
― Abigail Haas, quote from Dangerous Boys

“There is so much beauty in just existing. In being alive.”
― Hannah Harrington, quote from Saving June

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