James Hannaham > Quotes

“Y'all think a body be who you is, but it ain't nothing but a motherfucking sack of meat.”
― James Hannaham, Delicious Foods

“A story might help you get through your life, he said, but it doesn't literally keep you alive -- if anything, most often people who have power turn their story into a brick wall keeping out somebody else's truth, so that they can continue the life they believe themselves to be leading, trying somehow to preserve the idea that they're good people in their small lives, despite their involvement, however indirect, with bigger evils.”
― James Hannaham, Delicious Foods

“She kept seeing brothers she would think was him from far away and then get close and be like Oh, can’t be him, he got hands.”
― James Hannaham, Delicious Foods

“She found it disturbing and difficult to fathom when he repeated that the starlight they saw that night had really happened hundreds of years in the past and only reached theirs eyes that day. It offended her that the past could intrude so literally on the present yet never return.”
― James Hannaham, Delicious Foods

“I got all this stuff out and then I remembered that I’m a idiot, he said.”
― James Hannaham, Delicious Foods

“Everybody black knows how to react to a tragedy. Just bring out a wheelbarrow full of the Same Old Anger, dump it all over the Usual Frustration, and water it with Somebody Oughtas, all of which Bethella did. Then quietly set some globs of Genuine Awe in a circle around the mixture, but don’t call too much attention to that. Mention the Holy Spirit whenever possible.”
― James Hannaham, Delicious Foods

“In Texas, having a vehicle meant having a life--if you walked on the shoulder, everybody could see that you'd failed in some way. That you couldn't afford a vehicle, that your car had broken down and you couldn't pay for a cab, that you had no friends to call. Maybe you were too weird to hitchhike.”
― James Hannaham, Delicious Foods

“It offended her that the past could intrude so literally on the present yet never return.”
― James Hannaham, Delicious Foods

“Not like a idiot. Like a bitch in love, but half the time a bitch in love and a idiot be the same damn bitch.”
― James Hannaham, Didn't Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta

“Why does being alive have to mean always losing, always losing everything all the time? You”
― James Hannaham, Delicious Foods

“party people think only self-destructive activities are pleasurable and exciting; everything else bores them.”
― James Hannaham, Delicious Foods

“The men passed laughter between them like beer, mollifying a shared disappointment, frustration, and rage intense enough to turn murderous if you provoked it, though the opportunity to vent wouldn't ever arrive. Even if they got a chance, the talons of injustice would swoop down soon enough, dismember these men, and be gone, and everybody would forget that any of it had happened, aside from a lingering miasma that might rise into the spanish moss.”
― James Hannaham, Delicious Foods

“like many families, everyone wandered around like children in a funhouse—they could hardly see one another around the corners, and what they could see was completely distorted.”
― James Hannaham, Delicious Foods

“what’s helpless always gon take the biggest part of the rage.”
― James Hannaham, Delicious Foods

“when it came to their workplace, only God would show mercy.”
― James Hannaham, Delicious Foods

“Cause when people don’t know something happenin or that there’s a type a person that’s out there in the world, they think it don’t exist, an it suffers.”
― James Hannaham, Didn't Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta

“Many of the signs on stores were in Mexican.”
― James Hannaham, God Says No

“He reckoned that if you went around comparing your suffering to the suffering of Jesus, you could get through the worst of the worst like nothing happened.”
― James Hannaham, Delicious Foods