Erasure Quotes

“The world demands that you introduce yourself twice, first as you are, and second as you are told to be.”
― Percival Everett, Erasure

“A reiteration of the obvious is never wasted on the oblivious.”
― Percival Everett, Erasure

“It's incredible that a sentence is ever understood. Mere sounds strung together by some agent attempting to mean some thing but the meaning need not, and does not, confine itself to that intention.”
― Percival Everett, Erasure

“The hard, gritty truth of the matter is that I hardly ever think about race. Those times when I did think about it a lot I did so because of my guilt for not thinking about it. I don’t believe in race. I believe there are people who will shoot me or hang me or cheat me and try to stop me because they do believe in race, because of my brown skin, curly hair, wide nose and slave ancestors. But that’s just the way it is.”
― Percival Everett, Erasure

“Linda Mallory is the postmodern fuck.”
― Percival Everett, Erasure

“It would of course be a shame to get too old. There’s no virtue in living too long. Living shouldn’t become a habit.”
― Percival Everett, Erasure

“Linda Mallory was the postmodern fuck. She was self conscious to the point of distraction, counted her orgasms and felt none of them. She worried about how she looked while making love, about how her expression changed when she started to come, whether she was too tight, too loose, too dry, too wet, too loud, to quiet and she found need to express these concerns during the course of the event.”
― Percival Everett, Erasure

“The fear of course is that in denying or refusing complicity in the marginalization of 'black' writers, I ended up on the very distant and very 'other' side of a line that is imaginary at best. I didn't write as an act of testimony or social indignation (though all writing in some way is just that) and I did not write out of a so-called family tradition of oral storytelling. I never tried to set anybody free, never tried to paint the next real and true picture of the life of my people, never had any people whose picture I knew well enough to paint. Perhaps if I had written in the time immediately following Reconstruction, I would have written to elevate the station of my fellow oppressed.
But the irony was beautiful. I was a victim of racism by virtue of my failing to acknowledge racial difference and by failing to have my art be defined as an exercise in racial self-expression. So, I would not be economically oppressed because of writing a book that fell in line with the very books I deemed racist. And I would have to wear the mask of the person I was expected to be.”
― Percival Everett, Erasure

“If you don’t want a secret, don’t accept it.”
― Percival Everett, Erasure

“The books began to arrive, boxes of them. At first I could not open a single one, but was taken by them as objects. The covers were all so attractive. The jacket copy made each one sound great, blurbs from established literary icons told me why I should like it. The fat books were praised for being fat, the skinny books were praised for being skinny, old writers were great because they were old, young writers were talents because of their youth, every one was startling, ground-breaking, warm, chilling, original, honest and human. I would have found refreshing:

"Jo Blow’ s new novel takes on the mundane and leaves it right where it is. The prose is clear and pedestrian. The moves are tried and true. Yet the book is not so alarmingly dishonest. The characters are as wooden as the ones we meet in real life. This is a torturous journey through the banal. The novel is ordinary but not insipid, pointless but not meaningless, savorless but not stale.

Jo Blow is a middle aged writer with a family and no discernible special features. He lives in a house and is about as smart as his last novel."

So, I opened the first book and I loved it. Actually, I enjoyed reading. The book sucked. But I did enjoy reading it and so I read another and another. I read three in one night and the better part of the next day. All three were sterile, well-constructed, predictable fare. I decided that perhaps I was jaded. I was familiar with novels the way a surgeon is familiar with blood. I would have to contact my innocent, inner self, the part of me that could be amazed by the dull and commonplace.”
― Percival Everett, Erasure

“Anyone who speaks to members of his family knows that sharing a language does not mean you share the rules governing the use of that language.”
― Percival Everett, Erasure

“Then I wondered which was more confidence killing: believing that you should not have felt inadequate when in fact you were, or discovering that, all along, you were actually smart enough to see things clearly, that you were correct in your fear.”
― Percival Everett, Erasure

“While in college I was a member of the Black Panther Party, defunct as it was, mainly because I felt I had to prove I was black enough. Some people in the society in which I live, described as being black, tell me I am not black enough. Some people whom the society calls white tell me the same thing. I have heard this mainly about my novels, from editors who have rejected me and reviewers whom I have apparently confused and, on a couple of occasions, on a basketball court when upon missing a shot I muttered Egads.”
― Percival Everett, Erasure

“Poor me! A man without a religion, without a decent lie to call my own.”
― Percival Everett, Erasure

“At eighteen I realized I was eighteen and not so smart, or special and that might have been the only way that I was in fact special. I found my ideas poorly formed and repugnant, my self awkward, and, more or less, for lack of a better word, geeky. In fact my brother, second year medical student that he was, revisited his childhood and, when he passed in the hallway, muttered, "Geek."
"It's not my fault," I said.”
― Percival Everett, Erasure

“You have a special mind. The way you see things. If I had the patience to figure out what you were saying sometimes, I know you'd make me a smarter man.
...
And you're so relaxed. Hang on the that trait, son. That might serve you better than anything else in life.
...
It will prove handy for upsetting your siblings.”
― Percival Everett, Erasure

“While in college I was a member of the Black Panther Party, defunct as it was, mainly because I felt I had to prove I was black enough. Some people in the society in which I live, described as being black, tell me I am not black enough. Some people whom the society calls white tell me the same thing. I have heard this mainly about my novels, from editors who have rejected me and reviewers whom I have apparently confused and, on a couple of occasions, on a basketball court when upon missing a shot I muttered Egads.”
― Percival Everett, Erasure

“Have you gone to college?" I asked.

The girl laughed.

"Don't laugh," I said. "I think you're really smart. You should at least try."

"I didn't even finish high school."

I didn't know what to say to that. I scratched my head and looked at the other faces in the room. I felt an inch tall because I had expected this young woman with the blue finternails to be a certain way, to be slow and stupid, but she was neither. I was the stupid one.”
― Percival Everett, Erasure

“...my promotion to professor had come through. But the news did nothing to erase my depression over the rejection of my novel, the seventeenth one.

"The line is, you're not black enough," my agent said.

"What's that mean, Yul?" How do they even know I'm black? Why does it matter?"

"We've been over this before. They know because of the photo on your first book. They know because they've seen you....”
― Percival Everett, Erasure

“I was just remembering a former owner.

Oh, really?

No, really. His name was Professor Tilman. I never knew his first name. Maybe it was Professor.

....Professor Tilman was my uncle...We called him Uncle Professor.”
― Percival Everett, Erasure

“read three in one night and the better part of the next day. All three were sterile”
― Percival Everett, Erasure

“Academic training catering to such vulgar taste can only promise vulgarity. Rhetoricians are at the root of the decline of Oratory—empty speech for empty heads”
― Percival Everett, Erasure

“Perhaps if I had written in the time immediately following Reconstruction, I would have written to elevate the station of my fellow oppressed. But the irony was beautiful. I was a victim of racism by virtue of my failing to acknowledge racial difference and by failing to have my art be defined as an exercise in racial self-expression.”
― Percival Everett, Erasure

“I wouldn't use the cliché that I was the captain of a sinking ship, that implying some kind of authority, but rather I was a diesel mechanic on a steamship, an obstetrician in a monastery.”
― Percival Everett, Erasure

“I was seventeen and feeling more awkward than I ever had or would feel again.”
― Percival Everett, Erasure

“How's Mother?"

"In and out." As I said it I wondered which was the bad way: in or out? Was she lost when she was in her mind or out of it?”
― Percival Everett, Erasure

“Mother was down for one of the great battery of daily naps on which she had come to rely for a semblance of stability. Her most lucid moments seemed to occur when she first awoke and after that there were any number of cracks in the surface of her world through which to fall. There was no steering her toward solid ground; she stepped where she stepped.”
― Percival Everett, Erasure

“I had learned much about Marilyn and I guess she about me, but other people's information always seems more important or interesting or simply more like information.”
― Percival Everett, Erasure

“Where would you like me to take you?"

"Oh, Monksie, you know how I've always been about traveling. You decide. I'll be happy with wherever you pick."

"Detroit," I said.

The expression that crawled over and sat on her face was precious and let me know that she was no vegetable yet.

"Just joking," I said.

"I should say.”
― Percival Everett, Erasure

“So, you think I'm only concerned with myself."

"I didn't say that either. But, basically, that's true of all of us.”
― Percival Everett, Erasure