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The Sellout QUOTES

The Sellout QUOTES

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

― Paul Beatty , The Sellout

2 " I understand now that the only time black people don't feel guilty is when we've actually done something wrong, because that relieves us of the cognitive dissonance of being black and innocent, and in a way the prospect of going to jail becomes a relief. "

― Paul Beatty , The Sellout

3 " 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. "

― Paul Beatty , The Sellout

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

― Paul Beatty , The Sellout

5 " Yes, being black is a full-time job: sometimes you are invisible, other times you are hyper-visible,” he says. “Sometimes you are welcome, other times you are not. The thermostat is always moving and you have to keep adapting to find some comfort level. Richard Pryor used to talk about going to Africa and people there telling him he was white. Even though he was black, he just wasn’t black enough. "

― Paul Beatty , The Sellout

6 " The only people discussing “race” with any insight and courage are loud middle-aged white men who romanticize the Kennedys and Motown, well-read open-minded white kids like the tie-dyed familiar sitting next to me in the Free Tibet and Boba Fett T-shirt, a few freelance journalists in Detroit, and the American hikikomori who sit in their basements pounding away at their keyboards composing measured and well-thought-out responses to the endless torrent of racist online commentary. "

― Paul Beatty , The Sellout

7 " Who was I kidding? I'm a farmer, and farmers are natural segregationists. We separate the wheat from the chaff. I'm not Rudolf Hess, P. W. Botha, Capitol Records, or present-day U.S. of A. Those motherfuckers segregate because they want to hold on to power. I'm a farmer: we segregate in an effort to give every tree, every plant, every poor Mexican, every poor nigger, a chance for equal access to sunlight and water; we make sure every living organism has room to breathe. "

― Paul Beatty , The Sellout

8 " Tu dormis, tu perdis … You snooze, you lose. "

― Paul Beatty , The Sellout

9 " The real question is not where do ideas come from but where do they go. "

― Paul Beatty , The Sellout

10 " Daddy never believed in closure. He said it was a false psychological concept. Something invented by therapists to assuage white Western guilt. In all his years of study and practice, he’d never heard a patient of color talk of needing “closure.” They needed revenge. They needed distance. Forgiveness and a good lawyer maybe, but never closure. He said people mistake suicide, murder, lap band surgery, interracial marriage, and overtipping for closure, when in reality what they’ve achieved is erasure. "

― Paul Beatty , The Sellout

11 " And although like most black males raised in Los Angeles, I’m bilingual only to the extent that I can sexually harass women of all ethnicities in their native languages, I understood the gist of the message. "

― Paul Beatty , The Sellout

12 " Like Nazis at a Ku Klux Klan rally, they were comfortable ideologically, but not in terms of corporate culture. "

― Paul Beatty , The Sellout

13 " Your daddy doesn't know his assonance from his elegy! And he calls himself a poet. "

― Paul Beatty , The Sellout

14 " I sit in a thickly padded char that, much like this country, isn't quite as comfortable as it looks. "

― Paul Beatty , The Sellout

15 " I don’t care if you’re black, white, brown, yellow, red, green, or purple.’ We’ve all said it. Posited as proof of our nonprejudicial ways, but if you painted any one of us purple or green, we’d be mad as hell. "

― Paul Beatty , The Sellout

16 " That's the difference between most oppressed peoples of the world and American blacks. They vow never to forget, and we want everything expunged from our record, sealed and filed away for eternity. "

― Paul Beatty , The Sellout

17 " the Lost City of White Male Privilege, a controversial municipality whose very existence is often denied by many (mostly privileged white males). Others state categorically that the walls of the locale have been irreparably breached by hip-hop and Roberto Bolaño’s prose. That the popularity of the spicy tuna roll and a black American president were to white male domination what the smallpox blankets were to Native American existence. "

― Paul Beatty , The Sellout

18 " You’d rather be here than in Africa. The trump card all narrow-minded nativists play. If you put a cupcake to my head, of course, I’d rather be here than any place in Africa, though I hear Johannesburg ain’t that bad and the surf on the Cape Verdean beaches is incredible. However, I’m not so selfish as to believe that my relative happiness, including, but not limited to, twenty-four-hour access to chili burgers, Blu-ray, and Aeron office chairs is worth generations of suffering. I seriously doubt that some slave ship ancestor, in those idle moments between being raped and beaten, was standing knee-deep in their own feces rationalizing that, in the end, the generations of murder, unbearable pain and suffering, mental anguish, and rampant disease will all be worth it because someday my great-great-great-great-grandson will have Wi-Fi, no matter how slow and intermittent the signal is. "

― Paul Beatty , The Sellout

19 " The face that feigns acknowledgment that the better man got the promotion, even though deep down you and they both know that you really are the better man and that the best man is the woman on the second floor. "

― Paul Beatty , The Sellout

20 " Sometimes I wish Darth Vader had been my father. I'd have been better off. I wouldn't have a right hand, but I definitely wouldn't have the burden of being black and constantly having to decide when and if I gave a shit about it. Plus, I'm left-handed. "

― Paul Beatty , The Sellout