Quotes from Paul Beatty

I missed my father driving us back from the Pomona State Fair, elbowing me awake, the Dodger postgame on the radio as I rubbed the sleep from my eyes just in time to see that sign, DICKENS-NEXT EXIT, and know I was home. Shit, I missed that sign. And what are cities really, besides signs and arbitrary boundaries?

Motherfuckers from Harvard to Harlem respect the Pew Research Center

I understand now that the only time black people don't feel guilty is when we've actually done something wrong.

Don't tell me Kinshasa, the poorest city in the poorest country in the world, a place where the average per capita income is one goat bell, two bootleg Michael Jackson cassette tapes, and three sips of potable water per year, thinks we're too poor to associate with.

I suppose that's exactly the problem--I wasn't to know any better.

I fuck like an upturned guppy.

It's funny I want to write a poem.

Which one is grammatically correct? I never know.

I'm ghost, the afterlife is just a lay-up away.

if Disneyland was indeed the Happiest Place on Earth, you'd either keep it a secret or the price of admission would be free and not equivalent to the yearly per capita income of a small sub-Saharan African nation like Detroit.

You know why white people don't ever just happen to be white? Because they all think they've just happened to have been touched by God, that's why!" I

That's the problem with history, we like to think it's a book—that we can turn the page and move the fuck on. But history isn't the paper it's printed on. It's memory, and memory is time, emotions, and song. History is the things that stay with you.

Silence can be either protest or consent, but most times it's fear.

you have to ask yourself two questions: Who am I? And how may I become myself?

It's illegal to yell 'Fire!' in a crowded theater, right?" "It is." "Well, I've whispered 'Racism' in a post-racial world.

If Disneyland was indeed the Happiest Place on Earth, you'd either keep it a secret or the price of admission would be free and not equivalent to the yearly per capita income of a small sub-Saharan African nation like Detroit.

My father had a theory that poor people are the best drivers because they can't afford to carry car insurance and have to drive like they live, defensively.

Foy was no Tree of Knowledge, at most he was a Bush of Opinion

If New York is the City That Never Sleeps, then Los Angeles is the City That's Always Passed Out on the Couch.

If all the world's a stage, I want to operate the trap door.

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

Dumbfounded, I stood before the court, trying to figure out if there was a state of being between "guilty" and "innocent." Why were those my only alternatives? I thought. Why couldn't I be "neither" or "both"? After a long pause, I finally faced the bench and said, "Your Honor, I plead human.

People eat the shit you shovel them.

one's self-worth comes from how one chooses to navigate that space.