efil. > efil.'s Quotes

“We didn’t so much exist as much as we haunted, and with no one else to haunt, we haunted each other.”
― Gerardo Sámano Córdova, Monstrilio

“At that moment the power of reading made itself clear and real to me. If I could see the words, then no one could control them or what I got from them. They couldn’t even know if I was merely seeing them or reading them, sounding them out or comprehending them. It was a completely private affair and completely free and, therefore, completely subversive.”
― Percival Everett, James

“And it was so absurd - this father whose silence, for their whole lives, his silence had been a wound Richie thought he might never recover from - it was so absurd for him to be speaking in this way, for him to ask to be spoken to in this way, like they were in some play where fathers and sons said such things to one another.”
― Megan Nolan, Ordinary Human Failings

“But that is the nature of grammar—it is always tense, like an instrument, aching for release, longing to transform present into past into future, is into was into will.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, The River Has Roots

“When dreams repeat events from the past, when they mangle them, turn them into images, and sift them through a web of meanings, I start to fear that the past, just like the future, will remain obscure and inscrutable forever. The fact that I have experienced something doesn’t mean I have understood it. Suppose it turned out that something I thought I knew about and had always regarded as fixed and certain might have happened for a completely different reason and in a way I had never suspected. That it had led me to the wrong conclusion, and that I had failed to go in the right direction because I was blind, or asleep.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, House of Day, House of Night

“Speaking does harm, sows confusion and weakens things that are obvious. Speaking makes me tremble inside. I don't think I have ever said anything really important in my entire life -- there's a lack of words for the most important things anyway. (I must make a list of missing words -- top of it I'll put a verb that means something in between "I sense" and "I see.")”
― Olga Tokarczuk, House of Day, House of Night

“Whenever people say “everything,” “always,” “never,” “every,” they’re really only talking about themselves—in the real world such generalities don’t exist.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, House of Day, House of Night

“I hated the world that wouldn’t let me apply justice without the certain retaliation of injustice.”
― Percival Everett, James

“There is no God, child. There’s religion but there’s no God of theirs. Their religion tells that we will get our reward in the end. However, it apparently doesn’t say anything about their punishment. But when we’re around them, we believe in God. Oh, Lawdy Lawd, we’s be believin’. Religion is just a controlling tool they employ and adhere to when convenient.”
― Percival Everett, James

“Which would frighten you more? A slave who is crazy or a slave who is sane and sees you clearly?”
― Percival Everett, James

“To fight in a war,' he said. 'Can you imagine?'

'Would that mean facing death every day and doing what other people tell you to do?' I asked.

'I reckon.'

'Yes, Huck. I can imagine.”
― Percival Everett, James

“It’s a horrible world. White people try to tell us that everything will be just fine when we go to heaven. My question is, Will they be there? If so, I might make other arrangements.”
― Percival Everett, James

“Let’s try some situational translations. Something extreme first. You’re walking down the street and you see that Mrs. Holiday’s kitchen is on fire. She’s standing in her yard, her back to her house, unaware. How do you tell her?”
“Fire, fire,” January said.

“Lawdy, missum! Looky dere.”

“Perfect,” I said. “Why is that correct?” Lizzie raised her hand. “Because we must let the whites be the ones who name the trouble.”
― Percival Everett, James

“I really wanted to read. Though Huck was asleep, I could not chance his waking and discovering me with my face in an open book. Then I thought, How could he know that I was actually reading? I could simply claim to be staring dumbly at the letters and words, wondering what in the world they meant. How could he know? At that moment the power of reading made itself clear and real to me. If I could see the words, then no one could control them or what I got from them. They couldn’t even know if I was merely seeing them or reading them, sounding them out or comprehending them. It was a completely private affair and completely free and, therefore, completely subversive.”
― Percival Everett, James

“Tell the story with your ears. Listen.”
― Percival Everett, James

“That is what equality is, Jim. It's the capacity for becoming equal.”
― Percival Everett, James

“People, especially elders, repeat stories over and over again with purpose. In the arrogance of youth, we often think they do I because they are absent-minded. Now I know they repeat themselves because they’ve whittled like down into observations that should not be forgotten. They are authoring scriptures of their own.”
― Imani Perry, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People

“Melancholy is part of social movement, as is restraint. They are companions. The work of organizing for freedom requires a management of rage that can break your heart. There is no good reason one should have to endure spittle and bombs, insult, dogs, and jail in order to achieve simple legal recognition.”
― Imani Perry, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People

“Haiti has suffered. The first free Black republic was punished for its valor. The debt imposed upon it in exchange for a too-meager and inconsistent political recognition has kept it beholden to France, and along with that, it has born the weight of the US empire’s strategic investments and habitual efforts at military control. Internally, color and caste continued to matter long after the French were gone. Raimond changed, but the legacy of that plantation hierarchy is felt even today.”
― Imani Perry, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People

“blue took on particular meanings in specific contexts. On the revolutionary side, it was a color of Black self-adornment in the face of disregard. It reflected tastes retained across the oceans. And blue had an array of symbolic spiritual meanings.”
― Imani Perry, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People

“As far back as I can remember, I was aware of belonging to a group for whom the word “color” was potent. “The color of your skin,” “colored people,” “colorful people,” and “people of color” are all phrases that are associated with us Black Americans. And while “black” is our nominal color, even though our bodies range from alabaster to jet, the blues are our sensibility, hence the designation made famous by the writer Amiri Baraka: “blues people.”
― Imani Perry, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People

“Often I imagine that living is a game of rock-paper-scissors: fate beats hope, hope beats ignorance, and ignorance beats fate. Or, in a version that has preoccupied me: the fatalistic attracts the hopeful, the hopeful attracts the ignorant, and the ignorant, the fatalistic.”
― Yiyun Li, The Book of Goose

“The real story was beyond our ability to tell: our girlhood, our friendship, our love—all monumental, all inconsequential. The world had no place for two girls like us, though I was slow then, not knowing that Fabienne, slighted, thwarted, even fatally wounded, tried to make a fool of that world, on her and on my behalf. Revenge is a story that often begins with more promises than the ending can offer.”
― Yiyun Li, The Book of Goose

“But the world I—no, not I, Fabienne and I—had given them: Was it real? How much of it was real? We cannot measure a world with a ruler or a scale, and conclude that it is two inches, or two ounces, short of being real. All worlds, fabricated or not, are equally real. And so they are equally unreal. If I told my parents that in Paris I was posing for the press to photograph, they would say I was making up stories no one would believe. Paris was not real to them. Neither was my fame. The world Fabienne and I made together: it was as real as our nonsense.”
― Yiyun Li, The Book of Goose

“How do I measure Fabienne’s presence in my life—by the years we were together, or by the years we have been apart, her shadow elongating as time goes by, always touching me?”
― Yiyun Li, The Book of Goose

“Perhaps that was my intuition, acting sensibly and disarmingly baffled, as though the world were a mystery beyond my capacity, which I had accepted without protest, along with the fact that I, too, was part of that mystery, defying my own understanding.”
― Yiyun Li, The Book of Goose

“And Cora realizes her daughter has learned what to do. How to soothe, to placate. That just through watching, the first time she’s stepped into this role, she is already accomplished. If it doesn’t stop, Cora thinks, this pattern will repeat unendingly, the destiny of each generation set on the same course.”
― Florence Knapp, The Names

“She's 68 now, and although she knows the idea of being put out to pasture is a phrase others associate with obsolescence and redundancy, for her it conjures lushes green fields filled with buttercups where she's free to roam.”
― Florence Knapp, The Names

“There’s something about that—when the quietest person, most reserved in their opinions, most reluctant to impose their thoughts on others, finally speaks; you hear. Oh. Oh, and you’re suddenly face to face with the truth.”
― Florence Knapp, The Names