Home > Author > Kiese Laymon
121 " Like nearly everyone else at the gym, I wasn’t in the gym to be healthy, I was in the gym to feel in control of how fat I looked and felt. "
― Kiese Laymon , Heavy
122 " I'm here because I'm sad, lonely, and addicted to losing" is a sentence never shared between casino friends [...] I would always come back with the stated intention of winning and the unstated intention of harming myself. "
123 " You think I’m crazy, right? Well, I know that you can’t travel through time with a girl and save folks from the Klan and not kiss them unless you’re slightly deformed or unless you smell like death. And even then, there’s still gonna be some serious grinding going on. Serious grinding. "
― Kiese Laymon , Long Division
124 " Faulkner would have known that you cannot love any child in the United States of America if you refuse to accept that this nation was born of a maniacal commitment to the death, destruction, and suffering of Black, brown, and indigenous children and a moral annihilation of white children. Faulkner would have accepted that there has never been a time in this desperate nation’s history when American grown folk have refused to humiliate, abuse, and murder children. "
― Kiese Laymon , How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America
125 " How do you get good at love when your family disappeared and every day it feels like you and your friends are getting written off the face of the earth? "
126 " I will not say I am naked when I am fully clothed. I will not say I am sorry when I am resentful. "
127 " My body knew things my mouth and my mind couldn't, or maybe wouldn't, express...I didn't know how to tell you or anyone else the stories my body told me, but, like you, I knew how to run, deflect, and duck. "
― Kiese Laymon
128 " You and I have never been a family of cabinets filled with Band-Aids, alcohol, and peroxide. We have never been a family of tuck-ins and bedtime stories any more than we’ve been a family of consistent bill money, pantries, full refrigerators, washers and dryers. We have always been a bent black southern family of laughter, outrageous lies, and books. The "
129 " Yet, if I were to adhere to my mom's advice, I would have had to drop out of school years ago (since a lot of folks in our inequitable education system refuse to love us), quit engaging public health offices (because I walked in as a human in need of medical services and walked out as a patient whose subjective world was mad invisible by research lingo: "MSM," otherwise known as "men who have sex with men'), sleep in my bed all damn day (knowing it is more likely that I would be stopped by police when walking to the store in Camden or Bed-Stuy while rocking a fitted cap and carrying books than my white male neighbors would be while walking around in ski masks in the middle of summer and dropping a dime bag on the ground in front of a walking police and his dog)... "
130 " Your gifts of reading, rereading, writing, and revision are why I started this book thirty years ago on Grandmama’s porch. In spite of those gifts, or maybe because of those gifts, it’s important for me to accept, that like all American children, I’ve been brutally dishonest with you. And like all American parents, you’ve been brutally dishonest with me. "
131 " I am vulnerable, but not powerless. "
132 " I would try to kill anyone who harmed or spoke ill of you. You would try to kill anyone who harmed or spoke ill of me. But neither of us would ever, under any circumstance, be honest about yesterday. This is how we are taught to love in America. Our dishonesty, cowardice, and misplaced self-righteousness, far more than how much, or how little we weigh is part of why we are suffering. In this way, and far too many others, we are studious children of this nation. We do not have to be this way. "
133 " Daddy binders, bruh?Obama: Governor Romney loves him some binders, doesn't he. "
134 " In return for this care, I’d get a monthly check, some semblance of security, and moral certainty we were helping white folk be better at being human. This was new to me, but it was old black work, and this old black work, in ways you warned me about, was more than selling out; this old black work was morally side hustling backward. "
135 " Being twice as excellent as white folk will get you half of what they get. Being anything less will get you hell. "
136 " I would leave that meeting knowing that there are few things more shameful than being treated like a nigger by—and under the gaze of—intellectually "
137 " and imaginatively average white Americans who are not, and will never have to be, half as good at their jobs as you are at yours. "
138 " Because I can just tell you’ll never let me carry what you’re hiding. "
139 " They bruise us. They buy us. That is why we are so tired. That is why we are awakened. We are fighting an enemy we've shown exquisite grace, an enemy we've tried to educate, coddle, and outrun, an enemy that never tires of killing itself, just so it can watch us die. "