Mat Johnson > Quotes

“A man's daughter is his heart. Just with feet, walking out in the world.”
― Mat Johnson, Loving Day

“It is a great moment in every freak's life when he or she finds out that at least they are not the only one.”
― Mat Johnson, Pym

“I have found that, in the African American oral tradition, if the words are enunciated eloquently enough, no one examines the meaning for definitive truth.”
― Mat Johnson, Loving Day

“People aren't social, they're tribal. Race doesn't exist, but tribes are fucking real.”
― Mat Johnson, Loving Day

“Since White America refuses to see its past, they can't really see me either. Add to that a little of Madame C.J.s magic and watch me go invisible. Watch me step outside of history. Assimilation as revolution. That's one thing that most of us know that white folks don't. Race doesn't really exist. Culture? Ethnicity? Sure. Class too. But race is just a bunch of rules meant to keep us on the bottom. Race is a strategy. The rest is just people acting playing roles.”
― Mat Johnson, Incognegro

“Forgiveness comes later in life, after you've created enough disasters of your own.”
― Mat Johnson, Loving Day

“I like looking for myself in the whitest of pages. I like finding evidence of myself there, after being told my footprints did not exist on that sand. I think the work of the great white writers is important, but I think it's most important when it's negotiating me and my people, because I am as arrogant and selfish a reader as any other.”
― Mat Johnson, Pym

“There are two types of lazy bosses. One is so lazy that they make you do not only your own work but theirs too. Worse, they lie to you about it, unloading all responsibility for their actions. The other is so lazy that not only do they not do their own work but they can't even be bothered to provide you work to do. These bosses lie as well, but only to themselves, passively. The first is the hardest boss to work for, the second the easiest.”
― Mat Johnson, Pym

“In this age when reality is built on big lies, what better place for truth than fiction?”
― Mat Johnson, Pym

“What I discovered during my studies in Poe's and other early Americans' texts was the intellectual source of racial Whiteness. Here, in these pages, was the very fossil record of how this odd and illogical sickness formed. Here was the twisted mythic underpinnings of modern racial thought that could never before be dismantled because we were standing on them.”
― Mat Johnson, Pym

“The sociopaths, that's the real problem. The whole street demeanor is about pretending to be a sociopath as well, so that the real ones can't find you.”
― Mat Johnson, Loving Day

“People look at interracial couples through their own, distorting racial lens. It doesn't matter what form they take.”
― Mat Johnson, Loving Day

“I was participating in something horrible, and my only defense is that I was motivated by my own fear, which of course is no defense at all.”
― Mat Johnson

“I have always loved quitting jobs. Whether because the job itself was repugnant or the people working at it with me, I have always held my right to quit my job as one of my most sacred privileges. An entire ritual surrounds this shedding of employment. First, there is the glorious moment when, after the unpleasantness of my position and my general unhappiness become overwhelmingly apparent to me, I say to myself (and I quote), “Fuck this. I don’t have to take this shit anymore. They think they can make me do what they want, but I’m out of here.” Ah, there it is, the almost orgasmic release I feel when I first make the profane declaration to myself, the feeling of reclaimed power coursing invisibly through me. But not just that: this singular moment, this coveted private knowledge is formed into a golden kernel and popped into existence again in my mind as a reaction to every unfortunate work-related moment I’m forced to endure before I make my destined departure. It’s such a glorious thing, the harboring of this secret knowledge, that in itself it has kept me at many a job even longer than I had originally intended, because just knowing that I would soon be free was the most effective of panaceas. So much so that there were times when even though it was impossible for me to quit I would say the same words to myself and mercifully delude my conscious mind that I could get the hell out of there if I wanted to.”
― Mat Johnson, Pym

“In my head, I was getting 'gangsta,' which I've always felt showed greater intent than getting 'gangster' in that it expresses a willful unlawfulness even upon its own linguistic representation.”
― Mat Johnson, Pym

“Every misogynist came out of a woman.”
― Mat Johnson

“Curing America’s racial pathology couldn’t be done with good intentions or presidential elections.”
― Mat Johnson, Pym

“I was a boy that age once, and I know that 97.7 percent of their bodies are semen and the 2.8 percent is an incendiary device for spraying it.”
― Mat Johnson, Loving Day

“Even drunk, I knew any escape plan that involved going to Detroit, Michigan, was a harbinger of doom.”
― Mat Johnson, Pym

“…life is too short to be reading more books by white people. Especially dead ones.”
― Mat Johnson, Pym

“You've got to admit, slick, you got a skill for avoiding the devil."

"That just means that now the devils out there, looking for me...and that devil is very mad.”
― Mat Johnson, Incognegro

“That is how they stay so white: by refusing to accept blemish or history. Whiteness isn't about being something, it is about being no thing, nothing, an erasure. Covering over the truth with layers of blank reality just as the snowstorm was now covering our tent...(225)”
― Mat Johnson, Pym

“The people, they need someone to live through. Trust me, I used to be in roller derby back in the day. People need a hero.”
― Mat Johnson, Pym

“Some people age, and some just dehydrate.”
― Mat Johnson

“Here I was, on the cusp of my own great dream, my own impossible truth, and this gluttonous man was crowding it with his improbable vision. There wasn't enough magic in the universe for both of us. Worse, Garth's mad theory put mine in an altogether new light. Was I as crazy as his fat ass?”
― Mat Johnson, Pym

“TEKELI-LI. Tekeli-li, Tekeli-li. I got that from Pym. I got that from Poe. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe, specifically. Pym that is maddening, Pym that is brilliance, Pym whose failures entice instead of repel. Pym that flows and ignites and Pym that becomes so entrenched it stagnates for hundreds of words at a time. A book that at points makes no sense, gets wrong both history and science, and yet stumbles into an emotional truth greater than both.”
― Mat Johnson, Pym

“Okay, here’s the secret. It’s not really a secret, but I’ll frame it to you as one. The same people who despise you for identifying as mixed? Those are the same people who, when you do identify as black, despise you for not being black enough. And there’s nothing you can actually do to be black enough, for them. Because it’s not really how you act that they despise. It’s you. Your very existence.” She”
― Mat Johnson, Loving Day

“Curing America's racial pathology couldn't be done with good intentions or presidential elections. Like all diseases, it had to be analyzed at a microscopic level. What I discovered during my studies in Poe's and other early Americans' texts was the intellectual source of racial Whiteness. Here, in these pages, was the very fossil record of how this odd and illogical sickness formed. Here was the twisted mythic underpinnings of modern racial thought that could never before be dismantled because we were standing on them. (8)”
― Mat Johnson, Pym

“she loves everyone else here enough that she is willing to let them see all of who she is in this moment.”
― Mat Johnson, Loving Day

“The fear comes back but I don’t listen to it. I decide the fear itself is nothing of merit, a few little chemicals in my brain, dripping the wrong way. I walk right over and if I must I will walk right through.”
― Mat Johnson, Loving Day