“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, quote from Book Of Night Women
“She not black, she mulatto. Mulatto, mulatto, mulatto. Maybe she be family to both and to hurt white man just as bad as hurting black man…..Maybe if she start to think that she not black or white, then she won’t have to care about neither man’s affairs. Maybe if she don’t care what other people think she be and start think about what she think she be, maybe she can rise over backra and nigger business, since neither ever mean her any good. Since the blood that run through her both black and white, maybe she be her own thing. But what thing she be?”
― Marlon James, quote from Book Of Night Women
“People think blood red, but blood don't got no colour. Not when blood wash the floor she lying on as she scream for that son of a bitch to come, the lone baby of 1785. Not when the baby wash in crimson and squealing like it just depart heaven to come to hell, another place of red. Not when the midwife know that the mother shed too much blood, and she who don't reach fourteen birthday yet speak curse 'pon the chile and the papa, and then she drop down dead like old horse. Not when blood spurt from the skin, on spring from the axe, the cat-o'-nine, the whip, the cane and the blackjack and every day in slave life is a day that colour red. It soon come to pass when red no different from white or blue or black or nothing. Two black legs spread wide and mother mouth screaming. A black baby wiggling in blood on the floor with skin darker than midnight but the greenest eyes anybody ever done seen. I goin' call her Lilith. You can call her what they call her.”
― Marlon James, quote from Book Of Night Women
“She not no fool, Lilith tell herself. She not a sleeping princess and Robert Quinn is not no king or prince. He just a man with broad shoulders and black hair who call her lovey and she like that more than her own name. She don’t want the man to deliver her, she just want to climb in the bed and feel he wrap himself around her.”
― Marlon James, quote from Book Of Night Women
“Hate and love be closer cousin than like and dislike.”
― Marlon James, quote from Book Of Night Women
“You sure you can handle big woman chat, pickney? You sure you ready for that journey? You think good before you answer. Because some people about to forget that me be the head bloodcloth nigger in here. Now, go peel two potato and don't draw me tongue out in this place.”
― Marlon James, quote from Book Of Night Women
“—Lilith. Named you meself. Did you know Adam had a first wife before Eve? Called her Lilith, but the bitch was too headstrong so got rid of her, he did. Headstrong, another word for uppity.”
― Marlon James, quote from Book Of Night Women
“—You different, Lilith. You have more darkness ’bout you now. You turning into woman, Homer say to her. —Me turning into something, Lilith say.”
― Marlon James, quote from Book Of Night Women
“Gorgon say that Callisto was a woman who laugh all her life but never smile once.”
― Marlon James, quote from Book Of Night Women
“see how the white womens goin’ look and hear how white womens laugh in the colonies. She think of white flesh and black flesh, that really be brown flesh by blood and the two flesh melt into one flesh that don’t know colour. Then Lilith wonder if she dreaming because dreaming is one thing God never allow negro to do.”
― Marlon James, quote from Book Of Night Women
“Make me tell you something else about reading. You see this? Every time you open this you get free. Freeness up in here and nobody even have to know you get free but you." ~Homer, The Book of Night Women”
― Marlon James, quote from Book Of Night Women
“Homer say, Pretty gal go a river and see herself in water. Pretty gal drown when she go down to kiss herself.”
― Marlon James, quote from Book Of Night Women
“What making love feel like?"
"Making love? Like the longest sweetest tickling. Then it turn into something else and bump come up under your skin and is like one wave hit you toe and wash all the way up to you head, sometime one, two, three time. You never know two people could make that one feeling. With Benjy, me used to shake and move so hard because he do it so good. And you pussy? It feel like it just get bless. Making love is good thing, Lilith.”
― Marlon James, quote from Book Of Night Women
“—Little pussy like me still have bigger cock than the two of them, she say. She pull the gag out of Sacco mouth. —What you gonna do, Miss”
― Marlon James, quote from Book Of Night Women
“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, quote from Book Of Night Women
“Homer porge il libro a Lilith e lei lo prende fra le dita. Lilith si aspetta che sia come un vestito o un portagioielli, facile a rompersi come qualsiasi cosa dei backra. Il libro è duro e morbido al tempo stesso, la copertina su cui fa scorrere le dita sembra lino al tatto, o tela grezza, ma il libro è anche duro come il legno e spesso. Il libro è rosso come il vino o il sangue. Lei non ha mai, mai toccato né annusato niente di simile. Un effluvio come d'olio, o forse di ascelle di uomo bianco, o di polvere e qualcos'altro, tutte cose che separate hanno un odore orribile ma insieme creano la più meravigliosa delle miscele. Lilith chiude gli occhi e fiuta quell'odore come fosse tabacco.”
― Marlon James, quote from Book Of Night Women
Marlon James
Born place: in Kingston, Jamaica
Born date November 24, 1970
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“Hey, you look at your tits; I'll look at mine! (Michael Tolliver, Tales of the City)”
― Armistead Maupin, quote from Tales of the City
“You can speak, I said looking directly at him, I needed him to know I wasn’t afraid. I’d been dealing with wandering souls, which is what I like to think of them as, all my life.
They didn’t frighten me but I liked to ignore them so they would go away. If they ever thought I could see them, they followed me. He continued to watch me with an amused expression on his face. I noticed his crooked grin produced a single dimple. The dimple didn’t seem to fit with his cold, arrogant demeanor. As much as his presence annoyed me, I couldn’t help but admit this soul could only be labeled as ridiculously gorgeous.
Yes, I speak. Were you expecting me to be mute? I leaned my hip against the desk. Yes, as a matter of fact, I was. You’re the first one who has ever spoken to me. A frown creased his forehead. The first one? He appeared genuinely surprised he wasn’t the first dead person I could see. He was definitely the most unique soul I’d ever seen. Ignoring a soul who could talk was going to be”
― Abbi Glines, quote from Existence
“One loves ultimately one's desires, not the thing desired.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, quote from Beyond Good and Evil
“Oh, I've a love, a true, true love, who waits upon yon shore... and if my love won't be my love, then I will live no more...”
― Libba Bray, quote from The Sweet Far Thing
“I recall how miserable I was, and how one day you brought me to a realization of my miserable state. I was preparing to deliver a eulogy upon the emperor in which I would tell plenty of lies with the object of winning favor with the well-informed by my lying; so my heart was panting with anxiety and seething with feverish, corruptive thoughts. As I passed through a certain district in Milan I noticed a poor beggar, drunk, as I believe, and making merry. I groaned and pointed out to the friends who were with me how many hardships our idiotic enterprises entailed. Goaded by greed, I was dragging my load of unhappiness along, and feeling it all the heavier for being dragged. Yet while all our efforts were directed solely to the attainment of unclouded joy, it appeared that this beggar had already beaten us to the goal, a goal which we would perhaps never reach ourselves. With the help of the few paltry coins he had collected by begging this man was enjoying the temporal happiness for which I strove by so bitter, devious and roundabout a contrivance. His joy was no true joy, to be sure, but what I was seeking in my ambition was a joy far more unreal; and he was undeniably happy while I was full of foreboding; he was carefree, I apprehensive. If anyone had questioned me as to whether I would rather be exhilarated or afraid, I would of course have replied, "Exhilarated"; but if the questioner had pressed me further, asking whether I preferred to be like the beggar, or to be as I was then, I would have chosen to be myself, laden with anxieties and fears. Surely that would have been no right choice, but a perverse one? I could not have preferred my condition to his on the grounds that I was better educated, because that fact was not for me a source of joy but only the means by which I sought to curry favor with human beings: I was not aiming to teach them but only to win their favor.”
― Augustine of Hippo, quote from Confessions
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