Percival Everett Quotes

As a matter of fact, just recently I passed for white so I could pass for black.

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

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.

It's incredible that a sentence is ever understood. Mere sounds strung together by some agent attempting to mean some thing but the meaning need not, and does not, confine itself to that intention.

It’s almost noon, Trig,” I said. “We’ve nearly run out of morning. A sad thought, morning being my favorite part of the day. My least favorite part of the day is from 2:34 to 4:56 in the afternoon.

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.

- You know, dull tools are much more dangerous than sharp ones.
- I paused to admire his metaphor, but he continued.

She stared at the television. “Why is it that after all the bullets have bounced off Superman’s chest, he then ducks when the villain throws the empty gun at him?

Just keep living,” I said. “Just remember, once they see you, or see me in you, you’ve been seen. I know you don’t understand. But you will one day.

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.

Folks be funny lak dat. Dey takes the lies dey want and throws away the truths dat scares ’em.

It was clear that the people we had escaped on the beach were not following us; they were too concerned with being survivors.

There was nothing scarier than human sounds.

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.