A Brief History of Seven Killings

by Marlon James

Living people wait and see because they fool themselves that they have time. Dead people see and wait.

Woman breed baby, but man can only make Frankenstein.

They punched my father a couple times, and slapped my mother when she asked one of them if his mother knew that he was sinning. I asked her if any of the men had their way with her but said the rosebush was growing wild like a leggo beast, and I pretended I was talking to somebody else.

sometimes when you’re too careful it just turns into a different kind of carelessness.

He’s the worst kind of fool, the fool who start believing things can get better. Better will come, but not in the way he think.

Weeper is a man with a whole heap of stories. All of them start with a laugh, because Weeper is a man who love to joke. And that is how he play fisherman on you because the joke is the hook. But once he hook you the man drag you down the blackest, reddest, hottest pit of hell you could ever imagine. Then he laugh and just hold back to watch you try to climb your way back out.

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. Beauty has infinite range but so does wretchedness and the only way to accurately grasp the full, unending vortex of ugly that is Trench Town is to imagine it.

One time the Singer say to me, Papa, how you get to be top ranking when you worry so much? I didn’t tell him that be on top is to worry. Once you climb to the peak of the mountain, the whole world can take a shot.

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.

My mother is so afraid of trouble that trouble sticks to her close just because he never gets tired of proving a point.

every man who fight monster become a monster too,

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.

Rastafari must first begin with a fire, a fire deep down inside you that you can’t quench with a glass of water, and you can’t wait till it seep out your pores like sweat, you have to tear your mind open and let it rage out.

When you come into the real truth about yourself, you realize that the only person equipped to handle it is you. Some men can’t even handle that, which is why Bellevue always full. Some men can’t handle knowing what they are capable of.

You look at certain things and they is just certain things. Look at them another way and certain things add up to one big thing, one terrible thing, all the more terrible because you never add them up before.