Percival Everett Quotes

Like most people I am smarter than some, dumber than others, skinnier than most, and fatter than a few, but none was ever more confused than I was. I flew with confusion always parallel to me, and a whole internal chase at my rear. The one matter that was not confusing to me, but seemed to escape all the others, was the fact that the only thing that was certain to become obsolete, would necessarily become wearied and worn, was the truth. I knew this in spite of the truth that I had had little truck with the truth in my life. It was not that I considered myself a resident in a den of lies, but rather that my history was shrouded and diced and soaking wet with hysteria and contradiction. Contradictions or no, my trajectory through life, though different from most, was, nonetheless, a trajectory.

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

Religion is just a controlling tool they employ and adhere to when convenient.

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

Is she dead?” Norman asked. I rolled her onto her stomach to try to force the water out of her. I pushed on her chest and her shirt came up to reveal a hole. “Is that…” Norman stopped. I touched the blackened indentation. “She’s been shot,” I said. “Good Lord,” Norman said. “She’s dead.” “We should have left her where she was,” Norman said. “At least she’d be a live slave. Not just another dead runaway.” I studied the lifeless body on the ground before me. “She was dead when I found her,” I said. “She’s just now died again, but this time she died free.

Was it evil to kill evil? The truth was that I didn't care. It was this apathy that left me wondering about myself - not wondering why I didn't feel anything or whether I was incapable of feeling, but wondering what else I was capable of doing. It was not an altogether bad feeling.

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.

What you’re saying is that if someone pays you enough, it’s okay to abandon what you have claimed to understand as moral and right.

I really wanted to read. Though Huck was asleep, I could not chance his waking and discovering me with my face in an open book. Then I thought, How could he know that I was actually reading? I could simply claim to be staring dumbly at the letters and words, wondering what in the world they meant. How could he know? 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.

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.

"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."

A reiteration of the obvious is never wasted on the oblivious.

And though I missed my lover, I was not sad. I was satisfied. I was different.

The fear of course is that in denying or refusing complicity in the marginalization of 'black' writers, I ended up on the very distant and very 'other' side of a line that is imaginary at best. I didn't write as an act of testimony or social indignation (though all writing in some way is just that) and I did not write out of a so-called family tradition of oral storytelling. I never tried to set anybody free, never tried to paint the next real and true picture of the life of my people, never had any people whose picture I knew well enough to paint. Perhaps if I had written in the time immediately following Reconstruction, I would have written to elevate the station of my fellow oppressed.
But the irony was beautiful. I was a victim of racism by virtue of my failing to acknowledge racial difference and by failing to have my art be defined as an exercise in racial self-expression. So, I would not be economically oppressed because of writing a book that fell in line with the very books I deemed racist. And I would have to wear the mask of the person I was expected to be.

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