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Mat Johnson QUOTES

Mat Johnson QUOTES

1 " I was a boy that age once, and I know that 97.7 percent of their bodies are semen and the 2.8 percent is an incendiary device for spraying it. "

― Mat Johnson , Loving Day

2 " Forgiveness comes later in life, after you've created enough disasters of your own. "

― Mat Johnson , Loving Day

3 " I'm watching you, big boy, my eyes say, but his are closed so it's an optical monologue. "

― Mat Johnson , Loving Day

4 " Every misogynist came out of a woman. "

― Mat Johnson

5 " People aren't social, they're tribal. Race doesn't exist, but tribes are fucking real. "

― Mat Johnson , Loving Day

6 " The sociopaths, that's the real problem. The whole street demeanor is about pretending to be a sociopath as well, so that the real ones can't find you. "

― Mat Johnson , Loving Day

7 " People look at interracial couples through their own, distorting racial lens. It doesn't matter what form they take. "

― Mat Johnson , Loving Day

8 " Crackheads destroy things. First, their lives, obviously. And then their families. But they also destroy houses. They light fires and they have poor judgment; both things are required if you're going to be a crackhead. They make houses burn down. They're not as thorough as meth heads, who have the benefit of their exploding labs, but crackheads have left a respectable number of ruined buildings in their wake. A crackhead did it is a reasonable cause of destruction on any forensic report. A history of crackhead infestation is a legitimate explanation for loss of property. "

― Mat Johnson , Loving Day

9 " A man's daughter is his heart. Just with feet, walking out in the world. "

― Mat Johnson , Loving Day

10 " It is a great moment in every freak's life when he or she finds out that at least they are not the only one. "

― Mat Johnson , Pym

11 " I have found that, in the African American oral tradition, if the words are enunciated eloquently enough, no one examines the meaning for definitive truth. "

― Mat Johnson , Loving Day

12 " Since White America refuses to see its past, they can't really see me either. Add to that a little of Madame C.J.s magic and watch me go invisible. Watch me step outside of history. Assimilation as revolution. That's one thing that most of us know that white folks don't. Race doesn't really exist. Culture? Ethnicity? Sure. Class too. But race is just a bunch of rules meant to keep us on the bottom. Race is a strategy. The rest is just people acting playing roles. "

― Mat Johnson , Incognegro

13 " What I discovered during my studies in Poe's and other early Americans' texts was the intellectual source of racial Whiteness. Here, in these pages, was the very fossil record of how this odd and illogical sickness formed. Here was the twisted mythic underpinnings of modern racial thought that could never before be dismantled because we were standing on them. "

― Mat Johnson , Pym

14 " There are two types of lazy bosses. One is so lazy that they make you do not only your own work but theirs too. Worse, they lie to you about it, unloading all responsibility for their actions. The other is so lazy that not only do they not do their own work but they can't even be bothered to provide you work to do. These bosses lie as well, but only to themselves, passively. The first is the hardest boss to work for, the second the easiest. "

― Mat Johnson , Pym

15 " I was participating in something horrible, and my only defense is that I was motivated by my own fear, which of course is no defense at all. "

― Mat Johnson

16 " I like looking for myself in the whitest of pages. I like finding evidence of myself there, after being told my footprints did not exist on that sand. I think the work of the great white writers is important, but I think it's most important when it's negotiating me and my people, because I am as arrogant and selfish a reader as any other. "

― Mat Johnson , Pym

17 " In my head, I was getting 'gangsta,' which I've always felt showed greater intent than getting 'gangster' in that it expresses a willful unlawfulness even upon its own linguistic representation. "

― Mat Johnson , Pym

18 " I have always loved quitting jobs. Whether because the job itself was repugnant or the people working at it with me, I have always held my right to quit my job as one of my most sacred privileges. An entire ritual surrounds this shedding of employment. First, there is the glorious moment when, after the unpleasantness of my position and my general unhappiness become overwhelmingly apparent to me, I say to myself (and I quote), “Fuck this. I don’t have to take this shit anymore. They think they can make me do what they want, but I’m out of here.” Ah, there it is, the almost orgasmic release I feel when I first make the profane declaration to myself, the feeling of reclaimed power coursing invisibly through me. But not just that: this singular moment, this coveted private knowledge is formed into a golden kernel and popped into existence again in my mind as a reaction to every unfortunate work-related moment I’m forced to endure before I make my destined departure. It’s such a glorious thing, the harboring of this secret knowledge, that in itself it has kept me at many a job even longer than I had originally intended, because just knowing that I would soon be free was the most effective of panaceas. So much so that there were times when even though it was impossible for me to quit I would say the same words to myself and mercifully delude my conscious mind that I could get the hell out of there if I wanted to. "

― Mat Johnson , Pym

19 " In this age when reality is built on big lies, what better place for truth than fiction? "

― Mat Johnson , Pym

20 " Even drunk, I knew any escape plan that involved going to Detroit, Michigan, was a harbinger of doom. "

― Mat Johnson , Pym