Quotes from Paul Beatty

Crip up or grip up Ã¢â'¬Â¦ Criptum vexo vel carpo vex.

When she finished, the white teacher, his face streaked with tears, tapped his boss on the shoulder, and like a television cop handing in his badge and gun, he solemnly removed the shiny new Teach for America button fastened to his sweater vest, placed it in Charisma's palm, and walked off into the squall.

One if by Land Cruiser. Two if by C-class Mercedes. The bougies are coming! The bougies are coming!

Listing hard to the right like a drunken seaman with an inner ear infection.

I'd rather be judged by twelve than carried by six. It's a maxim, an oft-repeated rap lyric, a last-ditch rock and hard place algorithm that on the surface is about faith in the system but in reality means shoot first, put your trust in the public defender, and be thankful you still have your health. I

That there's something about the craziness that he had to go through that's kept me relatively sane.

All Vices and Bad Habits Referred to as "Phases" Not Responsible for Scratches, Dents, and Items Left in the Subconscious

I rationalized that there are only so many notes and therefore only so many combination of notes, so it stood to reason that there are so many songs.

This traffic-court jester did more than tell jokes; he plucked out your subconscious and beat you silly with it, not until you were unrecognizable, but until you were recognizable.

a small sub-Saharan African nation like Detroit.

During the height of the government enforcement of the Civil Rights Act, some segregated townships filled in their municipal pools rather than let nonwhite kids share in the perverse joy of peeing in the water.

I understand now that the only time black people don't feel guilty is when we've actually done something wrong, because that relieves us from the cognitive dissonance of being black and innocent.

because I knew that racist Negro Archetypes, like Bebe's Kids, don't die. They multiply.

One of the many sad ironies of African-American life is that every banal dysfunctional social gathering is called a "function." And

Founded in 1868, Dickens, like most California towns except for Irvine, which was established as a breeding ground for stupid, fat, ugly, white Republicans and the chihuahuas and East Asian refugees who love them, started out as an agrarian community.

And if you think about it, pretty much everything that made the twentieth century bearable was invented in a California garage: the Apple computer, the Boogie Board

I think about my own silence. Silence can be either protest or consent, but most times it's fear. I guess that's why I'm so quiet and such a good whisperer

And like that black president, you'd think that after two terms of looking at a dude in a suit deliver the State of the Union address, you'd get used to square watermelons, but somehow you never do.

Our teacher says we're supposed to be colorblind. That's hard to do if you can see color, isn't it?" "Yeah, I'd say so, but I think your teacher means don't make any assumptions based on color." "Cross on the green and not in between.

You either a poet or a homosexual." "Oh, shit, that's fucked up. Why can't I be both?

Congratulations, you may already be a winner! Your case has been selected from hundreds of other appellate cases to be heard by the Supreme Court of the United States of America.

Not surprisingly, there's nothing to do at the Pentagon except start a war.

I'm convinced that Nabokov wrote his novels around words like agglutinate, siliceous, gardyloo, ophidian, triskelions. That he took an ESL course at a local night school and the teacher wrote those words on the blackboard and said, "Today's assignment is to take these words and use them in a first novel the New York Times will call 'Riveting, truly a classic for the ages.

It'd taken only a few hours, but I felt like Michelangelo staring at the Sistine Chapel after four years of hard labor, like Banksy after spending six days searching the Internet for ideas to steal and three minutes of sidewalk vandalism to execute them.