Quotes from Paul Beatty

That's the difference between most oppressed peoples of the world and American blacks. They vow never to forget, and we want everything expunged from our record, sealed and filed away for eternity. We want someone like Foy Cheshire to present our case to the world with a set of instructions that the jury will disregard centuries of ridicule and stereotype and pretend the woebegone niggers in front of you are starting from scratch. Foy

But today I'm all medulla oblongata and I can't concentrate.

That's why your poems can never be no more than a description of life. The page is finite. Once you put the words down on paper, you've fossilized your thought. Bugs in amber, nigger. But music is life itself. Music is time. Played live, played at seventy-eight rpms, thirty-three and a third, backwards, looped, whatever. There's no need for translation. You understand or you don't.

Your dad used to think I was bipolar, but what I really am is by myself.

In English you label groups of people by their moral intentions and collective needs. A mob tries to convince itself it's right and needs to prove it. A crowd knows it's right because if it weren't right, they would all need to be someplace else. A throng doesn't give a fuck about moral imperatives, it just wants and needs something to happen.

It was hard to say if the statement was some sort of suicidal ideation, but one could hope.

I fuck like an overturned guppy.

Marse Compton hadn't aged but curdled like stagnant milk. His white arrogance had piled and thickened, casting its sour odor wherever he went.

I'd stand still for a few seconds, vainly snapping my fingers with as much hop of catching the beat as a quadriplegic hobo latching on to a moving boxcar.

city health workers set up camp in the gymnasium to ensure that America would have an able-bodied supply of future midlevel managers ready to lead the reinforcement brigades of minimum-wage foot soldiers to their capitalistic battle stations

A sentimental drunk and full of gin 'n' juice pride, he'd brag to our black neighbors how I'd never spent a day in day care or had a sandbox play date. Instead, he swore up and down I was nannied and mammied by a sow named Suzy Q and was the loser in a sibling "piglet versus niglet" rivalry to a porcine genius named Savoir Faire.

I'd stand still for a few seconds, vainly snapping my fingers with as much hope of catching the beat as a quadriplegic hobo latching on to a moving boxcar.

Who am I? And how may I become myself?

Thou shalt worship no god other than whiteness. Thou shalt not disagree with anything a white person says. When traveling in the company of a white person, thou shalt always maintain a respectful distance of two paces to the rear. If traveling by car for lunch at McDonald's with three or more white human deities, thou shalt never ride in the front seat nor request to change the radio station.

But anyone who'd ever been to Tito's Tacos and tasted a warm cupful of the greasy, creamy, refried frijole slop covered in a solid half-inch of melted cheddar cheese knew the bean had already reached genetic perfection.

Never confronted Foy at the meetings, because, as he put it, "our people are in dire need of everything except acrimony.

Jaguar model names sound like rockets: XJ–S, XJ8, E–Type. Hondas sound like cars designed by pacifists and humanitarian diplomats. The Accord, Civic, Insight.

Foy gave me the same sorrowful look the missionaries must've given the jungle heathen. A look that said, It doesn't matter if you're too stupid to understand God's love. He loves you regardless, just hand over the women, the distance runners, and the natural resources.

I refuse the blindfold and take the most glorious toke ever taken in the history of pot smoking. Call every racially profiled, abortion-denied, flag-burning, Fifth Amendment taker and tell them to demand a re-trial, because I'm getting high in the highest court in the land.

Unmitigated Blackness is simply not giving a fuck. Clarence Cooper, Charlie Parker, Richard Pryor, Maya Deren, Sun Ra, Mizoguchi, Frida Kahlo, black-and-white Godard, Céline, Gong Li, David Hammons, Björk, and the Wu-Tang Clan in any of their hooded permutations.

That like the pigs, we all have our heads in the trough. While the hogs don't believe in God, the American dream, or the pen being mightier than the sword, they do believe in the feed in the same desperate way we believe in the Sunday paper, the Bible, black urban radio, and hot sauce. On

He wants to believe that Shakespeare wrote all those books, that Lincoln fought the Civil War to free the slaves and the United States fought World War II to rescue the Jews and keep the world safe for democracy, that Jesus and the double feature are coming back. But I'm no Panglossian American.

No one has, because even in this middle age, he's sensitive, and if you say the wrong thing, he'll show the world just how sensitive he is by crying at your funeral.

She was thinking about how her middle-school alma mater was now 75 percent Latino, when in her day it was 80 percent black. Thinking