Percival Everett > Quotes

“At that moment the power of reading made itself clear and real to me. If I could see the words, then no one could control them or what I got from them. They couldn’t even know if I was merely seeing them or reading them, sounding them out or comprehending them. It was a completely private affair and completely free and, therefore, completely subversive.”
― Percival Everett, James

“Everybody should read fiction… I don’t think serious fiction is written for a few people. I think we live in a stupid culture that won’t educate its people to read these things. It would be a much more interesting place if it would. And it’s not just that mechanics and plumbers don’t read literary fiction, it’s that doctors and lawyers don’t read literary fiction. It has nothing to do with class, it has to do with an anti-intellectual culture that doesn’t trust art.”
― Percival Everett

“Read. Always read. No one can take that away from you.”
― Percival Everett, I Am Not Sidney Poitier

“Belief has nothing to do with truth.”
― Percival Everett, James

“If you're not making mistakes, you're not learning.”
― Percival Everett, James

“I had never seen a white man filled with such fear. The remarkable truth, however, was that it was not the pistol, but my language, the fact that I didn’t conform to his expectations, that I could read, that had so disturbed and frightened him.”
― Percival Everett, James

“I hated the world that wouldn’t let me apply justice without the certain retaliation of injustice.”
― Percival Everett, James

“There is no God, child. There’s religion but there’s no God of theirs. Their religion tells that we will get our reward in the end. However, it apparently doesn’t say anything about their punishment. But when we’re around them, we believe in God. Oh, Lawdy Lawd, we’s be believin’. Religion is just a controlling tool they employ and adhere to when convenient.”
― Percival Everett, James

“Which would frighten you more? A slave who is crazy or a slave who is sane and sees you clearly?”
― Percival Everett, James

“With my pencil, I wrote myself into being.”
― Percival Everett, James

“Everybody talks about genocides around the world, but when the killing is slow and spread over a hundred years, no one notices. Where there are no mass graves, no one notices. American outrage is always for show. It has a shelf life.”
― Percival Everett, The Trees

“Dey takes the lies dey want and throws away the truths dat scares ’em.”
― Percival Everett, James

“How strange a world, how strange an existence, that one’s equal must argue for one’s equality, that one’s equal must hold a station that allows airing of that argument, that one cannot make that argument for oneself, that premises of said argument must be vetted by those equals who do not agree.”
― Percival Everett, James

“I did not look away. I wanted to feel the anger. I was befriending my anger, learning not only how to feel it, but perhaps how to use it.”
― Percival Everett, James

“Why will I bury you? So that one day I might disturb your grave.”
― Percival Everett, The Water Cure

“I considered the northern white stance against slavery. How much of the desire to end the institution was fueled by a need to quell and subdue white guilt and pain? Was it just too much to watch? Did it offend Christian sensibilities to live in a society that allowed that practice? I knew that whatever the cause of their war, freeing slaves was an incidental premise and would be an incidental result.”
― Percival Everett, James

“But my interest is in how these marks that I am scratching on this page can mean anything at all. If they can have meaning, then life can have meaning, then I can have meaning.”
― Percival Everett, James

“I can tell you that I am a man who is cognizant of his world, a man who has a family, who loves a family, who has been torn from his family, a man who can read and write, a man who will not let his story be self-related, but self-written.”
― Percival Everett, James

“- You know, dull tools are much more dangerous than sharp ones.
- I paused to admire his metaphor, but he continued.”
― Percival Everett, James

“We're slaves. We're not anywhere. Free person, he can be where he wants to be. The only place we can ever be is in slavery.”
― Percival Everett, James

“The world demands that you introduce yourself twice, first as you are, and second as you are told to be.”
― Percival Everett, Erasure

“Religion is just a controlling tool they employ and adhere to when convenient.”
― Percival Everett, James

“To fight in a war,' he said. 'Can you imagine?'

'Would that mean facing death every day and doing what other people tell you to do?' I asked.

'I reckon.'

'Yes, Huck. I can imagine.”
― Percival Everett, James

“It’s a horrible world. White people try to tell us that everything will be just fine when we go to heaven. My question is, Will they be there? If so, I might make other arrangements.”
― Percival Everett, James

“I chose the word enemy, and still do, as oppressor necessarily supposes a victim.”
― Percival Everett, James

“I saw the surface of her, merely the outer shell, and realized that she was mere surface all the way to her core.”
― Percival Everett, James

“White people often spent time admiring their survival of one thing or another. I imagined it was because so often they had no need to survive, but only to live.”
― Percival Everett, James

“You should know I consider police shootings to be lynchings”
― Percival Everett, The Trees

“The children said together, “And the better they feel, the safer we are.” “February, translate that.” “Da mo’ betta dey feels, da mo’ safer we be.” “Nice.”
― Percival Everett, James

“Way I sees it is dis. If’n ya gots to hab a rule to tells ya wha’s good, if’n ya gots to hab good ’splained to ya, den ya cain’t be good. If’n ya need sum kinda God to tells ya right from wrong, den you won’t never know.”
― Percival Everett, James