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81 " The meetings consisted mostly of the members who showed up every other week arguing with the ones who came every other month about what exactly "bimonthly" means. "
― Paul Beatty , The Sellout
82 " Both dudes wore khakis whose baggy leggings spilled over two pairs of Nike Cortez sneakers so fucking new that if they had taken one shoe off and placed it to their ear like a conch shell, they'd hear the roar of an ocean of sweatshop labour. "
83 " Hondas sound like cars designed by pacifists and humanitarian diplomats. The Accord, Civic, Insight. "
84 " I've finally figured out what's wrong with Washington D.C. It's that all the buildings are more or less the same height and there's absolutely no skyline, save for the Washington Monument touching the night sky, like a giant middle finger to the world. "
85 " Not surprisingly, there's nothing to do at the Pentagon except start a war. Tourist aren't even allowed to take photos with the building in the background, so when the sailor-suited family of Navy veterans four generations deep handed me a disposable camera and asked me to follow at a distance and secretly take photos of them while they snapped to attention, saluted, and flashed peace signs for no apparent reason, I was only too happy to serve my country. "
86 " These are the women my father warned me about. The drug-and-asshole-addled women who sit in the dark, hard up and lovesick, chainsmoking cigarettes, phones pressed to their ears, speed-dialing K-Earth 101 FM, the oldies station, so they can request Nina Simone or the Shirelles' "This is Dedicated to the One I Love," aka "This Is Dedicated to Niggers That Beat Me Senseless and Leave". "Stay away from bitches who love Nina Simone and have faggots for best friends," he'd say. "They hate men. "
87 " But today I’m all medulla oblongata and I can’t concentrate. "
88 " 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? "
89 " For those looking to find the thing that you’ve lost, the decision of where to place your handbill is one of the toughest you’ll ever make in life. "
90 " And like that black president, you’d think that after two terms of looking at a dude in a suit deliver the State of the Union address, you’d get used to square watermelons, but somehow you never do. "
91 " In neighborhoods like the oneI grew up in, places that are poor in proxy but rich in rhetoric, the hollies have a saying - I'd rather be judged by twelve than carried by six. "
92 " That the city would return to being the thriving white suburb of his youth. Cars with tail fins. Straw hats and sock hops. Episcopalians and ice cream socials. It would be the opposite of white flight, he said. “The Ku Klux influx.” But when I’d ask him how, he’d just shrug and, like a conservative senator without any ideas, filibuster me with unrelated stories about the good ol’ days. "
93 " Factio vestri aevum, non vestri calceus amplitudo. And "
94 " ...true freedom is having the right to be a slave. "
95 " Sometimes I'd chance across an elderly member of the community standing in the middle of the street, unable to cross the single white line. Puzzled looks on their faces from asking themselves why they felt so strong about the Dickens side of the line as opposed to the other side. When there was just as much uncurbed dog shit over there as here. When the grass, what little of it there was, sure in the fuck wasn't any greener. When the niggers were just as trifling, but for some reason they felt like they belonged on this side. And why was that? When it was just a line. "
96 " That's the problem with this generation; they don't know their history. "
97 " When the mind experiences a power surge of stress and bullshit, it switches off, just shuts your cognition down and you blank out. "
98 " Would he read the paper and see that the Union he saved was now a dysfunctional plutocracy, "
99 " Perspicacity. "
100 " I fuck like an upturned guppy. "