A Brief History of Seven Killings Quotes

“Now he is a man who could talk to God and the devil and make them work out they difference--as long as neither of them have a woman.”
― Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings

“I want her to look at me and smile just to show that she knows that I know that she knows”
― Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings

“Learn this, all nice and decent people. An election year commence as soon as the first gunshot buss.”
― Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings

“Can’t play it safe when nowhere safe anymore”
― Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings

“Something new is blowing. On a downtown Kingston wall: IMF—Is Manley Fault. General election called for October 30, 1980. Somebody is driving you through Bavaria, near the Austrian border. A hospital sprouting out of the forest like magic. Hills in the background tipped with snow like cake icing. You meet the tall and frosty Bavarian, the man who helps the hopeless. He smiles but his eyes are set too far back and they vanish in the shadow of his brow. Cancer is a red alert that the whole body is in danger, he says. Thank God the food he forbids, Rastafari had forbidden long time. A sunrise is a promise. Something new is blowing. November 1980. A new party wins the general election and the man who killed me steps up to the podium with his brothers to take over the country. He has been waiting for so long he leaps up the stairs and trips.”
― Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings

“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, A Brief History of Seven Killings

“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, A Brief History of Seven Killings

“But she didn’t say it, she sing it so we know that it’s you. And plenty in the ghetto, in Copenhagen City, in Rema, and for sure in the Eight Lanes sing it too. 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, A Brief History of Seven Killings

“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, A Brief History of Seven Killings

“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, A Brief History of Seven Killings

“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, A Brief History of Seven Killings

“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.”
― Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings

“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, A Brief History of Seven Killings

“This is the first mistake God make. Time. God was a fool to create time. It’s the one thing that even he run out of. But me beyond time. Me in the now, which is now which is also then. Then is also soon and soon might as well be if.”
― Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings

“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, A Brief History of Seven Killings

“you see and wait,”
― Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings

“am slowly realizing that even though the Singer is the center of the story that it really isn’t his story. Like there’s a version of this story that’s not really about him, but about the people around him, the ones who come and go that might actually provide a bigger picture than me asking him why he smokes ganja.”
― Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings

“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, A Brief History of Seven Killings

“The two men who bring guns to the ghetto watch you sing yourself out of their hands and they not happy at all. Nobody uptown singing thanks and praises for you. Not the man who bring guns to the Eight Lanes, still run by Shotta Sherrif. That man know him party going up for re-election and they need to win, to stay in power, to bring power to the people, all comrades and socialists. Not the Syrian who bring guns to Copenhagen City and who want to win the election so bad that he will move God himself if God in the seat. The American who come with guns know that whoever win Kingston win Jamaica and whoever win West Kingston win Kingston, before any man in the ghetto tell him.”
― Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings

“Three year in prison and a dick is just another thing to put up your ass.”
― Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings

“Part of it seems like how these Americans grew up. They collect things. So Tony Curtis or Tony Orlando will show up at Mantana’s and they all ask him for this autograph business, which is him signing his name on a napkin. And they cling to it, and collect it like they’ll never see Tony Curtis again. Now Chuck is taking things home, collecting them like he had to make sure they were safe. I don’t know what he has to protect a coffee cup from. Or five boxes of rubber bands, a picture of Farrah Fawcett, a picture of President Carter or a box full of liquor as if they don’t have liquor in America. Or a sculpture of a Rastaman grabbing on to his an erect penis, the head bigger than his actual head. The man must think he is Noah saving a statue of a Rasta with a huge cock for his ark. If he’s saving that fucking sculpture and don’t plan to save me I swear to God I will kill him.”
― Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings

“Politicians rise in the east and set in the west and nothing you can change about them.”
― Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings

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

“—Looking? —Ah . . . no . . . —Then how you’re gonna know when you found it?”
― Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings

“retribution was coming for the stupid, not the smart.”
― Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings

“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, A Brief History of Seven Killings

“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, A Brief History of Seven Killings

“the policeman move up the line saying, You can’t fuck, go home. You can’t fuck neither remove youself. You look like you can fuck, stay. You go, you go. Hold on, hold on now, you move like is you the one who getting the fucking. Batty boy, remove youself, and you, you better stay.”
― Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings

“Sunt vizavi, aștept în stația de autobuz, dar până acum am lăsat să treacă două. Apoi al treilea. El n-a ieșit pe ușa din față. Nici măcar o dată, ca eu să pot traversa strada într-o clipă și să strig: îți mai amintești de mine? Nu ne-am văzut de mult. Am nevoie de ajutorul tău.”
― Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings

“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, A Brief History of Seven Killings