James McBride Quotes
It's the same old story. Nothing in this world happens unless white folks says it happens. And therein lies the problem of being a professional black storyteller - writer, musician, filmmaker.
Quotes to Explore
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We keep, in science, getting a more and more sophisticated view of our essential ignorance.
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Every dogma, every philosophic or theological creed, was at its inception a statement in terms of the intellect of a certain inner experience.
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Elizabeth, Lady C, claims to be writing at the limits of language. Would it not be insulting to her if I were diligently to follow after her, explaining what she means but is not smart enough to say?
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With ladder matches, you can't expect anything other than craziness.
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I got into politics because I was tired of complaining.
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I have fabulous children.
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Constant togetherness is fine - but only for Siamese twins.
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I don't know how it started but someone must have noticed I was always chewing tobacco or smoking a pipe.
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I made myself famous by writing 'songs' and lyrics about the beauty of the things I did and ugliness, too.
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The human soul needs actual beauty more than bread.
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The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.
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It was hard at school because, growing up, some people wanted to be friends with me just because they wanted to get to my dad and say that they had met him and had gone to our house. I didn't understand it at the time, but the older I got and the more aware of it I became, it started becoming hard.
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There are epic downsides to living a somewhat public life. The upshot of that is there's nothing to hide. It's a relief in a way. There's nothing about me that can't be said.
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The best way to cope with trouble is to stay out of it as much as possible.
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The funny thing is that my husband couldn't be sweeter. He looks like this bad boy. He's got tattoos and earrings and a mohawk, but when you talk to him and he's around you, he's such a gentleman. He holds doors for ladies. He pulls out chairs. He cooks. He cleans.
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Equality, rightly understood as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences; wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism.
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I am an artist who works with Lego.
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My music is bejewelled, it's colourful, it's romantic, it shines.
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We are living in 1937, and our universities, I suggest, are not half-way out of the fifteenth century. We have made hardly any changes in our conception of university organization, education, graduation, for a century - for several centuries.
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Eight days the light continued on its own: A miracle, they say, but not more so Than ordinary lives of flesh and bone, Consuming wicks burned ashen long ago.
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When I meet somebody in the street who knows about 'Humans of New York,' a lot of times they might have a scripted answer, and that scripted answer is the first thing to come out of their mouth.
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I call myself a traditionalist, although I have fought against tradition all my life.
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It's weird because I see black gay characters on television all the time, but do I relate to them? Not always, because they're set pieces.
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It's the same old story. Nothing in this world happens unless white folks says it happens. And therein lies the problem of being a professional black storyteller - writer, musician, filmmaker.
