Home > Author > Walter Mosley
21 " That's how powerful you are, girl...You pretty, but pretty alone is not what people see. You the kinda pretty, the kinda beauty, that's like a mirror. Men and women see themselves in you, only now they so beautiful that they can't bear to see you go. "
― Walter Mosley , The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey
22 " That’s how Ptolemy imagined the disposition of his memories, his thoughts: they were still his, still in the range of his thinking, but they were, many and most of them, locked on the other side a closed door that he’s lost the key for. So his memory became like secrets held away from his own mind. But these secrets were noisy things; they babbled and muttered behind the door, and so if he listened closely he might catch a snatch of something he once knew well. "
23 " There are as many kinds of love as there are flowers and bugs put together but men and women and their needs are all the same. "
― Walter Mosley , All I Did Was Shoot My Man (Leonid McGill, #4)
24 " I wondered if I could just drop the role I carried like a mantle of a dethroned prince. "
25 " The girl was cinnamon colored in the way of Native America after it had been raped by Europe. "
26 " I don’t give a fuck what you’re trying to do or what you want. I’d send your ass away if you were a white man with a red ribbon tied around your dick. "
27 " Science fiction [is] the kind of writing that prepares us for the necessary mutations brought about in society from an ever changing technological world and as a result. The mainstream hasn’t excluded SF; the mainstream has excluded itself. No one told Jules Verne he was a science fiction writer, but he invented the 20th century. "
― Walter Mosley
28 " He made me question what was, when for a whole lifetime up till that moment, I accepted the world’s excuses. "
29 " It was mid-November 2008. There were pirates taking ships with impunity in African waters, terrorists punching holes in Indian security, China sinking towards depression because Americans were afraid to buy cheap goods for Christmas, and the richest nation in the history of the world was talking about how to keep a budget. "
― Walter Mosley , Known to Evil (Leonid McGill, #2)
30 " It's not that racism doesn't exist. Lots of people in New York, and elsewhere, hate because of color and gender, religion and national origin. It's just that I rarely worry about those things because there's a real world underneath all that nonsense; a world that demands my attention almost every second of the day. Racism is a luxury in a world where resources are scarce, where economic competition is an armed sport, in a world where even the atmosphere is plotting against you. In an arena like that racism is more of a halftime entertainment, a favorite sitcom when the day is done. "
31 " We got a call from across the street that a black woman had broken into this house.”“And you were going to arrest her without even knocking on the door?”“We had to secure her first. Um. Are you okay, ma’am?”“Of course I am. Don’t you see me?”“Because we have her in custody. You don’t have to be afraid.”“I’m not afraid of my daughter-in-law, Mrs. Theon Pinkney. She’s the one who should be afraid. Four big men grabbing her and putting her in chains. What’s wrong with you?”The police stood there, slightly confused. I could see that they felt justified, even righteous, for grabbing me in Marcia’s driveway. There was no question in their minds that I was a criminal and that they were on the side of the Law.Marcia glanced at me then. We’d spent hours together but it was as if she hadn’t really gotten a good look at me until seeing the tableau in her driveway. "
― Walter Mosley , Debbie Doesn't Do It Anymore
32 " It is important for this country to make its people so obsessed with their own liberal individualism that they do not have time to think about a world larger than self. "
― Walter Mosley , Black Genius: African-American Solutions to African-American Problems
33 " When we black people commit ourselves to living simply as a political action, as a way of breaking the stress caused by unrelenting hedonistic desire for material objects that are not needed for survival, or essential to well-being, we will not be talking about ebonics. We will be out in the streets demanding that the public schools have enough teachers so that all kids, cross color, can read and write in standard English and in Spanish too. "
34 " The great man say that life is pain," Coydog had said over eighty-five years before. "That mean if you love life, then you love the hurt come along wit' it. Now, if that ain't the blues, I don't know what is. "
35 " I always keep thinkin' that maybe I could find a place where you nevah have to get mad, and then I'd be cool. My daddy told me before he died that that place was called Dead. "
― Walter Mosley , The Awkward Black Man
36 " I couldn't see why it shouldn't be my one hundred dollars. "
37 " But Socco," Mustafa Ali said. "If there ain't no black people really and they ain't no white people then how come you still usin' them words?""Because them words still usin' me, brother Ali. They usin' me like a mothahfuckah. "
― Walter Mosley , The Right Mistake
38 " I have to agree that most people in America read a kind of a fiction which is not of a high literary calibre. People read for entertainment. "
39 " A peasant that reads is a prince in waiting. "
― Walter Mosley , The Long Fall (Leonid McGill, #1)
40 " A man's bookcase will tell you everything you'll ever need to know about him," my father had told me more than once. "A businessman has business books and a dream has novels and books of poetry. Most women like reading about love, and a true revolutionary will have books about the minutiae of overthrowing the oppressor. A person with no books is inconsequential in a modern setting, but a peasant that reads is a prince in waiting. "