Quotes from Paul Beatty

I can think of a more despicable word than 'nigger'", I volunteered. […] "Like what?" "Like any word that ends in –ess: Negress. Jewess. Poetess. Actress. Adultress. Factchecktress. I'd rather be called 'nigger' than 'giantess' any day of the week.

Winston knew better than to give a heartfelt synopsis of a grainy black-and-white film that had inadvertently touched his heart and caused him to empathize with a loafer-shod French boy, Doinel, the young, unloved Parisian, running toward the sea in the last reel. Winston had wanted to chase behind him, clasp him on the shoulder...

For those looking to find the thing that you've lost, the decision of where to place your handbill is one of the toughest you'll ever make in life.

Germans either want to kill you or fuck you.

It's like the specter of segregation has brought the city of Dickens back together again." I decided to give my new career as City Planner in Charge of Restoration and Segregation another six months. If things didn't work out, I could always fall back on being black.

separate and not quite equal, but infinitely better off than ever before.

In neighborhoods like the oneI grew up in, places that are poor in proxy but rich in rhetoric, the hollies have a saying - I'd rather be judged by twelve than carried by six.

We recognized the face he was wearing as a mask from our own collections. The happy mask we carry in our back pockets, and like bank robbers whip out when we want to steal some privacy or make an emotional getaway.

school, whenever I had to do something like memorize the periodic table, my father would say the key to doing boring tasks is to think about not so much what you're doing but the importance of why you're doing it. Though when I asked him if slavery wouldn't have been less psychologically damaging if they'd thought of it as "gardening," I got a vicious beating that would've made Kunta Kinte wince.

When I reached the vestibule of my apartment building, the campus police closed in on me. I heard Professor Edelstein shout, it's okay, he's a poet. Matter of fact, the best black ... the best poet writing today." The cops instantly backed off. I was protected by poetic immunity. I had permission to act crazy.

Most of the concert reviews in the next day's paper would describe the crowd milling about the Slumberland as "diverse" without saying what made them so. In polite democratic society it's important to note stratification but impolite to label the layers.

That the city would return to being the thriving white suburb of his youth. Cars with tail fins. Straw hats and sock hops. Episcopalians and ice cream socials. It would be the opposite of white flight, he said. "The Ku Klux influx." But when I'd ask him how, he'd just shrug and, like a conservative senator without any ideas, filibuster me with unrelated stories about the good ol' days.

Strictly dickly Ã¢â'¬Â¦ Austerus verpa.

Blood in, blood out Ã¢â'¬Â¦ Minuo in, minuo sicco.

Most couples have songs they call their own. We had books. Authors. Artists. Silent movies.

Any nigger who isn't paranoid is crazy Ã¢â'¬Â¦ Ullus niger vir quisnam est non insanus ist rabidus is

Sometimes it's the nihilism that makes life worth living.

He was less like a tree of knowledge and more like a bush of opinions." From the book "The Sellout

If he was indeed an "autodidact," there's no doubt he had the world's shittiest teacher.

Both dudes wore khakis whose baggy leggings spilled over two pairs of Nike Cortez sneakers so fucking new that if they had taken one shoe off and placed it to their ear like a conch shell, they'd hear the roar of an ocean of sweatshop labour.

Sto facendo studi a dimostrazione che il vino rosso è davvero la panacea per tutti i mali

Hondas sound like cars designed by pacifists and humanitarian diplomats. The Accord, Civic, Insight.

Quando la mente subisce un picco energetico di stress e stronzate, si spegne, chiude i circuiti cognitivi, e tu hai un vuoto mentale. Agisci, ma non sei consapevole delle tue azioni

Call every racially profiled, abortion-denied, flag-burning, Fifth Amendment taker and tell them to demand a retrial, because I'm getting high in the highest court in the land.