Percival Everett Quotes

History is a motherfucker,

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.

Of all possible worlds this was the one in which I had landed.

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.

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.

Linda Mallory is the postmodern fuck.

Heating and cooling it like that will harden the steel,” Easter said. “Metaphor,” I said. “That’s nearly all we have,” Easter said.

I'm wanted for being a runaway, kidnapping, theft and murder.'
'Are you guilty?' Holly asked.
'Does it matter?' I asked.

dull tools are much more dangerous than sharp ones.

I read and read, but what I needed was to write. I needed that pencil. I could not keep track of my thoughts. I could not follow my own reasoning after a while. This was perhaps because I couldn't stop reading long enough to make space in my head. I was like a man who had not eaten for a season and had then gorged himself until sick. And my books, once read, were not what I wanted, not what I needed.
(...)
With my pencil, I wrote myself into being. I wrote myself to here.

If you're not making mistakes, you're not learning.

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.

I suspected at that moment that I would not die, but it was unclear whether I would be pleased about that fact.

It's okay to love something bigger than yourself without fearing it. Anything worth loving is bigger than we are anyway.

Let’s try some situational translations. Something extreme first. You’re walking down the street and you see that Mrs. Holiday’s kitchen is on fire. She’s standing in her yard, her back to her house, unaware. How do you tell her?”
“Fire, fire,” January said.

“Lawdy, missum! Looky dere.”

“Perfect,” I said. “Why is that correct?” Lizzie raised her hand. “Because we must let the whites be the ones who name the trouble.