Quotes by Jamaican Authors

Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights.
Bob Marley
Every day I get better at knowing that it is not a choice to be an activist; rather, it is the only way to hold on to the better parts of my human self. It is the only way I can live and laugh without guilt.
Staceyann Chin
The aim of military training is not just to prepare men for battle but to make them long for it.
Louis Simpson
Prohibition is to abstain from intoxicating liquor, as it makes us morbid and sometimes drunk. But we get drunk every day, nevertheless, not so much by the strength of what we sip from the cup, but that which we eat, the water we drink, and the air we inhale, which at fermentation conspire at eventide to make us so drunk and tired that we lose control of ourselves and fall asleep. Everybody is a drunkard, and if we were to enforce real prohibition we should all be dead.
Marcus Garvey
I want to fall in love, with an emphasis on the falling part.
Nicola Yoon
Three year in prison and a dick is just another thing to put up your ass.
Marlon James
I've read many more books than you. It doesn't matter how many you've read. I've read more. Believe me.” ― Nicola Yoon, Everything, Everything
Nicola Yoon
How many rivers do we have to cross,Before we can talk to the boss?
Bob Marley
Kissing is just another way of talking expect without the words.
Nicola Yoon
I could stay here forever interrupting our talking with kissing, interrupting our kissing with talking.
Nicola Yoon
If We Must DieIf we must die, let it not be like hogsHunted and penned in an inglorious spot,While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,Making their mock at our accursèd lot.If we must die, O let us nobly die,So that our precious blood may not be shedIn vain; then even the monsters we defyShall be constrained to honor us though dead!O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!What though before us lies the open grave?Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
Claude McKay
Touching him is order and chaos, like being assembled and disassembled at the same time.
Nicola Yoon
They will always tell you that you can't do what you want to do, but you can do what you want to do. You just have to believe in yourself. The system is to bring you down, but you can rise up.
Bob Marley
A universe that can wink into existence can wink out again.
Nicola Yoon
My music will go on forever. Maybe it's a fool say that, but when me know facts me can say facts. My music will go on forever.
Bob Marley
There's no denying it now. I'm in the world. And, too, the world is in me.
Nicola Yoon
His words made me aware that the heart in my chest is a muscle like any other. It can hurt.
Nicola Yoon
Thankfully, Coach had taught me a way of embracing the pain. He called that overwhelming rust of hurt 'The Moment of No Return', a point of pure agony when the body told an athlete to quit, to rest, because the pain was so damn tough. It was a tipping point. He reckoned that if an athlete dropped in The Moment, then all the pain that went before it was pointless, the muscles wouldn't increase their current strength. But if he could work through the pinch and run another two reps, maybe 3, them the body would physically improve in that time, and that was when an athlete grew stronger.
Usain Bolt
He thinks my hair smells like spring rain. I'm really trying to remain stoic and unaffected. I remind myself that I don't like poetic language. I don't like poetry. I don't even like people who like poetry.But I'm not dead inside either.
Nicola Yoon
The day Verdene left for England, a part of Margot left with her. Verdene has brought color back into her life. Before, everything was black-and-white: Make money or die trying. Feel pain or feel nothing at all.
Nicole Dennis-Benn
...when she wakes up, there is silence, as though the day has held its breath.
Nicole Dennis-Benn
The ocean will swallow you whole and burp you out and not notice you were even there.
Nicola Yoon
The ocean here is weird. It's the wrong kind of blue.
Nicola Yoon
Sometimes it didn't seem possible that I could be so unhappy, considering how much I had compared to other kids my age, and, believe me, I understood how extremely lucky I was. Sometimes things didn't add up.
Sharon Leach
This is the life you're living. It's not temporary and it's not pretend and there's no do-over.
Nicola Yoon
The believer is not a slave to fa
Abu Ameenah Bilal Philips
Just because I’ve been gone from this country for most of my life doesn’t mean I understand it any less. When I was fifteen I left Jamaica. I knew that I was a lesbian then and, because of what I looked like, I was an out lesbian. It was hard for me. It was hard for the thirteen years I was in England, for various reasons, and it’s going to be difficult here as well. I don’t anticipate anything being easy. But I’d rather suffer the chance of someone accosting me for being a dyke than suffer the emotional violence I’d do to myself if I wasn’t honest about who I am.
Fiona Zedde
I work hard, and I do good, and I’m going to enjoy myself. I’m not going to let you restrict me.
Usain Bolt
When you smoke the herb, it reveals you to yourself.
Bob Marley
We are going to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery, for though others may free the body, none but ourselves can free the mind. Mind is our only ruler; sovereign.
Marcus Garvey
Write about only three things: what you love, what you hate, and what you’re deeply conflicted about.
Marlon James
Love won't kill you.-Carla
Nicola Yoon
Across from her, Hunter devoured her meal even more completely than she had. Sinclair watched her sink sharp teeth into the chicken bone, heard it snap, then the soft grunt of satisfaction. She made soft sucking sounds then emptied her mouth of the tiny ground up remains on a corner of her dish. Hunter ate with rabbit-like intensity, biting and sucking and spitting in an even rhythm until all that was left on the plate was a small brown and beige pile of ground bones. She finally looked up and caught Sinclair staring.
Fiona Zedde
Even she hair itself rough and wiry; long black knotty locks springing from she scalp and corkscrewing all the way down she back... The only thing soft about Tan-Tan is she big molasses-brown eyes that could look on you, and your heart would beat time...
Nalo Hopkinson
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
One love, one heart . . .Let’s get together and feel all right
Bob Marley
[His eyes are] Atlantic Ocean blue, just like he'd said. It's strange because of course I'd known that. But the difference between knowing it and seeing them in person is the difference between dreaming of flying and flight.
Nicola Yoon
Then I wondered if everybody has that person that haunts them, the one that got away.
Marlon James
Love hard when there is love to be had. Because perfect guys don’t exist, but there’s always one guy that is perfect for you.
Bob Marley
Beauty and ingenuity beat perfection hands down, every time.
Nalo Hopkinson
To know a man properly, you must know the shape of his hurt - the specific wound around which his person has been formed like a scab.
Kei Miller
No man is an island, no man stands alone
Dennis Brown
Loving someone as fiercely as my mom loves me must be like wearing your heart outside of your body with no skin, no bones, no nothing to protect it.
Nicola Yoon
Anything can happen at anytime. Safety is not guaranteed. There's more to life than being alive.
Nicola Yoon
Be Brave. Remember, life is a gift.
Nicola Yoon
Freedom without the means to be self-supporting is a one-armed triumph.
Michelle Cliff
In late 1949, at two and a half years old, I arrived in Jamaica for the first time. I had crossed the Atlantic by air from England. My Jamaican father was studying in London, my European mother was sick, and so in true Jamaican style I was sent home to my grandparents.
Rachel Manley
He says they're not his type, but I don't really get the concept of having a type. My type is girls. All of them. Why would I limit my dating pool?
Nicola Yoon
My guilt is an ocean for me to drown in.
Nicola Yoon
Each person walks a journey unique to himself or herself. Live your own journey and run your own race.
Winsome Campbell-Green
So there’s a freeing up that happens when I can go into that storytelling mode...It isn’t about how much sense you make, it is about how compelling you are. (interview)
Nalo Hopkinson
Who reads? Not that I begrudge my life in book. All I know about the world I've learned from them. But a description of a tree is not a tree, and a thousand paper kisses will never equal the feel of Olly's lips against mine.
Nicola Yoon
If I could, I would kiss him every second of every day. For all the days.
Nicola Yoon
He tastes like salted caramel and sunshine. Or what I think salted caramel and sunshine taste like. He tastes like nothing I've ever experienced, like hope and possibility and future
Nicola Yoon
If people who were actually born had to prove they were worthy enough to live in America, this would be a much less populated country.
Nicola Yoon
In two weeks my skin will have no memory of Olly's hand on mine, but my brain will remember. We can have immortality or the memory of touch. But we can't have both.
Nicola Yoon
Mid-range, androgynous voice. I first thought that Solaris was a guy. Then a girl. Maybe. Then I gave up trying to figure out which. It would become obvious at some point, or not.
Nalo Hopkinson
I regard the Klan, the Anglo-Saxon clubs and White American societies, as far as the Negro is concerned, as better friends of the race than all other groups of hypocritical whites put together.
Marcus Garvey
Everything's a risk. Not doing anything is a risk.
Nicola Yoon
When your elders are millennia-old demigods, you’d best take the injunction to respect your elders seriously.
Nalo Hopkinson