Percival Everett Quotes

"Should we save them, Jim?"
The boy was so innocent.
"Huck, I reckon if'n we save 'em, dey gonna turn me in. What you think?"
The boy studied on that for a spell. "I reckon you're right. But what will them folks do to them?"
"I don't know, Huck. Maybe dey jest pay a fine. Maybe dey get tarred and feathered. I don't know."
"That seems right awful."
"I s'pose it do. But dey was stealin' from dem folk. Tellin' lies lak dey was. He weren't neber no pirate."
"Yes, but them people liked it, Jim. Did you see their faces? They had to know them was lies, but they wanted to believe. What do you make of that?"
"Folks be funny lak dat. Dey takes the lies dey want and throws away the truths dat scares 'em."
The river put its full pull on us and we watched the men grow smaller.
"I reckon I do that, too," the boy said.
"What say?"
"I kin see how much you miss yer family and yet I don't think about it. I forget that you feel things jest like I feel. I know you love them."
"Thank you, Huck."

Linda Mallory is the postmodern fuck.

The lie felt good because I had taken control of the narrative around me.

No creo en ningún Dios. Es imposible sentarse aquí, tocar todas estas carpetas, leer todas las páginas y seguir creyendo en un dios.

There was a mama raccoon that lived in the tree. She had taken to walking past me nonchalantly in the darkness. Tonight she stayed in the tree, high above me, listening to the dogs. We were both animals and we didn’t know which of us was the prey. We accepted that we both were.

You should know I consider police shootings to be lynchings

I had to hide my excitement about the discovery of books.

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.

I thought you were going to say I was dead,' I said.

'I just couldn't kill you off,' the boy said.

'Thank you, Huck.

had already come to understand the tidiness of lies, the lesson learned from the stories told by white people seeking to justify my circumstance.

Tell them I’m called February, but that I was born in June. They like thinking that we’re stupid like that.

He’s going to get drunk now, not so much because he can, but because we can’t,” I said.

I was, in life, to be a gambler, a risk taker, a swashbuckler, a knight. I accepted, then and there, my place in this world. I was a fighter of windmills. I was a chaser of whales.

Read. Always read. No one can take that away from you.

But in this notebook I would reconstruct the story I had begun, the story I kept beginning, until I had a story.