Jason Mott > Quotes

“Laugh all you want, but I think learning to love yourself in a country where you're told that you're the plague on the economy, that you're nothing but a prisoner in the making, that you life can be taken away from you at any moment and there's nothing you can do about it - learning to love yourself in the middle of all that? Hell, that's a goddamn miracle.”
― Jason Mott, Hell of a Book

“Anything worthwhile takes time. Maybe that's what time is for: to give meaning to the things we do; to create a context in which we can linger in something until, finally, we have given it something invaluable, something that we can never get back: time. And once we've invested the most precious commodity that we will ever have, it suddenly has meaning and importance. So maybe time is just how we measure meaning. Maybe time is how we best measure love.”
― Jason Mott, Hell of a Book

“Some folks locked the doors of their hearts when they lost someone. Others kept the doors and the windows open, letting memory and love pass through freely. And maybe that was the way it was supposed to be, Harold thought.”
― Jason Mott, The Returned

“The South is America’s longest running crime scene.”
― Jason Mott, Hell of a Book

“All you really want is for the people around you to be safe. And there’s nobody in this world that you want safety for more than your children. So when you can’t give that to them, it swells up around your life. It swallows you up. You get afraid to let them leave the house because the monster of the world might come along and swallow them up. And the thing is that, eventually, that’s exactly what happens. Every child like you in this country has been swallowed up by the monster since before they were even born. And every Black parent in the history of this country has tried to stop that monster from swallowing them up and has failed at it. And every day they live with that.”
― Jason Mott, Hell of a Book

“There is a music that forms sometimes, from the pairing of two people. An inescapable cadence that continues on.”
― Jason Mott, The Returned

“I’m not sure Black people can be happy in this world. There’s just too much of a backstory of sadness that’s always clawing at their heels. And no matter how hard you try to outrun it, life always comes through with those reminders letting you know that, more than anything, you’re just a part of an exploited people and a denied destiny and all you can do is hate your past and, by proxy, hate yourself”
― Jason Mott, Hell of a Book

“If there’s one thing America will always lead the world in,” Harold said, “it’s assholes with guns.”
― Jason Mott, The Returned

“I consider Renny’s words and I look down at my black hands. “Do I have to write about being Black? What if I were an artist that only drew White characters? What would that say about me?” “What?” “I mean, White writers don’t have to write about being White. They can just write whatever books they want. But because I’m Black . . .” I pause to look at my hands and reaffirm that, yes, I really am Black. The story checks out. “. . . does that mean that I can only ever write about Blackness? Am I allowed to write about other things? Am I allowed to be something other than simply the color of my skin? I mean, I can’t quote it word for word, but isn’t that what the whole ‘I Have a Dream’ speech was about?”
― Jason Mott, Hell of a Book

“Lastly, a message to the Black boy that was: You are beautiful. Be kind to yourself, even when this country is not.”
― Jason Mott, Hell of a Book

“But isn’t that the way it is with memory? Give it enough time and it will become worn down and covered in a patina of self-serving omissions.”
― Jason Mott, The Returned

“People and events of wonder and magic are the lifeblood of the world.”
― Jason Mott, The Returned

“You will forget him.” He tried to find the words to say, “This boy is only the first of many that you will meet over your life. They will stack upon one another, week by week. You’ll try to keep them in your head but, eventually, you’ll become too full and they’ll spill out and be left behind. And then, one day, you’ll grow older and you’ll realize that you’ve forgotten his name—the name of the first dead Black boy that you promised yourself you wouldn’t forget—and you’ll hate yourself. You’ll hate your memory. You’ll hate the world. You’ll hate the way you’ve failed to stop the flow of dead bodies that have piled up in your mind. You’ll try to fix it, and fail, and you’ll drown in rage. You’ll turn on yourself for not fixing everything and you’ll drown in sadness. And you’ll do it over, and over, and over again for years and, one day, you’ll have a son and you’ll see him staring down the same road that you’ve been on and you’ll want to say something that fixes him, something that saves him from it all . . . and you won’t know what to say.”

William wanted to say all of the correct words to Soot, but they were not in his mind. All that was in William’s mind was the image of his son lying on the concrete, dead, just like all the boys that came and went on television.”
― Jason Mott, Hell of a Book

“Memory and death are countries that know no geography.”
― Jason Mott, Hell of a Book

“The main problem I’ve found with dating is that, at some point in the process, you have to include other people. You have to actually interact with another human being. And when it comes to people . . . well . . . I’ve never really been a fan.”
― Jason Mott, Hell of a Book

“But the thing to know and remember is that you can never be something other than what you are, no matter how much you might want to. You can't be them. You can only be you. And they're going to always treat you differently than they treat themselves. They won't ever know about it--at least, most of them won't. Most of them will think that everything is okay and that you're being treated well enough and that everything is beautiful. Because, I guess for them, all they can imagine is a world in which things are fair and beautiful because, after all, they've always been treated fairly and beautifully. History has always been kind to them.”
― Jason Mott, Hell of a Book

“facts exist objectively, regardless of whether or not you believe them.”
― Jason Mott, Hell of a Book

“Post-Racial. Trans–Jim Crow. Epi-Traumatic. Alt-Reparational. Omni-Restitutional. Jingoistic Body-Positive. Sociocultural-Transcendental. Indigenous-Ripostic. Treaty of Fort Laramie–Perpendicular. Meta-Exculpatory. Pan-Political. Uber-Intermutual. MLK-Adjacent. Demi-Arcadian Bucolic. That is the vernacular of the inclusive, hyphenated, beau-American destiny we’re manifesting here! You and me! Book by book we’re making it happen! But it doesn’t happen by planting flags and picking at the scabbed-over wounds of a certain Dispossessed Neo-Global Cultural demographic committed at the hands of a onetime possibly improprietous proto-nation.”
― Jason Mott, Hell of a Book

“Spending your life on nothing but gossip and hearsay isn’t any way to stay informed.”
― Jason Mott, The Returned

“Science has proven that there’s a limited number of people that we can ever actually care about.”
― Jason Mott, Hell of a Book

“Reality as a whole—past or present—just isn’t a good place to hang out, in my opinion”
― Jason Mott, Hell of a Book

“Mommies are always okay because the world couldn’t get along without them. That’s what my daddy said back before he died. He said that mommies were the reason the whole world worked the way it did and that without mommies everybody would be mean and hungry and people would be fighting all the time and nothing good would ever happen to anybody.”
― Jason Mott, The Returned

“Laugh all you want, but I think learning to love yourself in a country where you’re told that you’re a plague on the economy, that you’re nothing but a prisoner in the making, that your life can be taken away from you at any moment and there’s nothing you can do about it—learning to love yourself in the middle of all that? Hell, that’s a goddamn miracle.”
― Jason Mott, Hell of a Book

“That's what the Fear really came down to. That's what all of the other fears were derived from for people of a certain skin color living in a certain place. But it wasn't just a fear, it was a truth. A truth proven time and time again for generations. A truth passed down through both myth and mandate, from lip-to-lip to legislation. Certain bodies don't belong to their inhabitants. Never have, never will again. A persistent, inescapable, and horrific truth known by millions of unsettled bodies. The Fear.”
― Jason Mott, Hell of a Book

“There should be a word for the ability to stop crying about a past pain even though it's still in you. There should be a word for living.

Yes, that's it. There should be a word for continuing to live when a part of you has died. There should be a word that sums that up. And the longer you live, the more that word should become a part of you. Because the thing of it is, every day that the person is missed feels longer and there's nothing you can do about it. Nothing you can do to share the long, beautiful days which they are not a part of.”
― Jason Mott, People Like Us

“It was a good word: progress. A safe word that you snuggled up against when you were nervous. The kind of word you took home to meet your parents.”
― Jason Mott, The Returned

“No one anybody would miss.”
― Jason Mott, The Returned

“She wanted to have a child that could exist beyond it all. She wanted a child that could be free from it. A child that could never get shot. A child that didn’t have to be afraid. A child that she didn’t have to be afraid for because, at any moment, they could just disappear.”
― Jason Mott, Hell of a Book

“the future of this country is all about patriotic, unity-inducing language. Post-Racial. Trans–Jim Crow. Epi-Traumatic. Alt-Reparational. Omni-Restitutional. Jingoistic Body-Positive. Sociocultural-Transcendental. Indigenous-Ripostic. Treaty of Fort Laramie–Perpendicular. Meta-Exculpatory. Pan-Political. Uber-Intermutual. MLK-Adjacent. Demi-Arcadian Bucolic.”
― Jason Mott, Hell of a Book

“What you're really asking is whether or not you and I are the same person. And I'm not really sure that it matters. No. What matters here with me and you, Kid, is what we do with it all. What matters is how we feel about it, about one another, about ourselves. What matters is the fact that if it wasn't my dad that got shot and killed it was somebody else's dad. What matters is that if it wasn't you or me that got shot and killed, it was another kid.

And it's always someone in this world. That's the catch.”
― Jason Mott, Hell of a Book