The Sellout Quotes

“That’s the problem with history, we like to think it’s a book—that we can turn the page and move the fuck on. But history isn’t the paper it’s printed on. It’s memory, and memory is time, emotions, and song. History is the things that stay with you.”
― Paul Beatty, The Sellout

“Silence can be either protest or consent, but most times it’s fear.”
― Paul Beatty, The Sellout

“I'm so fucking tired of black women always being described by their skin tones! Honey-colored this! Dark-chocolate that! My paternal grandmother was mocha-tinged, café-au-lait, graham-fucking-cracker brown! How come they never describe the white characters in relation to foodstuffs and hot liquids? Why aren't there any yogurt-colored, egg-shell-toned, string-cheese-skinned, low-fat-milk white protagonists in these racist, no-third-act-having books? That's why black literature sucks!”
― Paul Beatty, The Sellout

“...you have to ask yourself two questions: Who am I? And how may I become myself?”
― Paul Beatty, The Sellout

“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

“My father had a theory that poor people are the best drivers because they can’t afford to carry car insurance and have to drive like they live, defensively.”
― Paul Beatty, The Sellout

“If Disneyland was indeed the Happiest Place on Earth, you'd either keep it a secret or the price of admission would be free and not equivalent to the yearly per capita income of a small sub-Saharan African nation like Detroit.”
― Paul Beatty, The Sellout

“Foy was no Tree of Knowledge, at most he was a Bush of Opinion”
― Paul Beatty, The Sellout

“If New York is the City That Never Sleeps, then Los Angeles is the City That’s Always Passed Out on the Couch.”
― Paul Beatty, The Sellout

“Unmitigated Blackness is coming to the realization that as fucked up and meaningless as it all is, sometimes it’s the nihilism that makes life worth living.”
― Paul Beatty, The Sellout

“This may be hard to believe, coming from a black man, but I’ve never stolen anything. Never cheated on my taxes or at cards. Never snuck into the movies or failed to give back the extra change to a drugstore cashier indifferent to the ways of mercantilism and minimum-wage expectations. I’ve never burgled a house. Held up a liquor store. Never boarded a crowded bus or subway car, sat in a seat reserved for the elderly, pulled out my gigantic penis and masturbated to satisfaction with a perverted, yet somehow crestfallen, look on my face. But here I am, in the cavernous chambers of the Supreme Court of the United States of America, my car illegally and somewhat ironically parked on Constitution Avenue, my hands cuffed and crossed behind my back, my right to remain silent long since waived and said goodbye to as I sit in a thickly padded chair that, much like this country, isn’t quite as comfortable as it looks.”
― Paul Beatty, The Sellout

“If he was indeed an “autodidact,” there’s no doubt he had the world’s shittiest teacher.”
― Paul Beatty, The Sellout

“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

“People eat the shit you shovel them.”
― Paul Beatty, The Sellout

“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

“one’s self-worth comes from how one chooses to navigate that space.”
― Paul Beatty, The Sellout

“The real question is not where do ideas come from but where do they go.”
― Paul Beatty, The Sellout

“Tu dormis, tu perdis … You snooze, you lose.”
― Paul Beatty, The Sellout

“Act your age, not your shoe size … Factio vestri aevum, non vestri calceus amplitudo.”
― Paul Beatty, The Sellout

“There should be a Stage IV of black identity—Unmitigated Blackness. I’m not sure what Unmitigated Blackness is, but whatever it is, it doesn’t sell. On the surface Unmitigated Blackness is a seeming unwillingness to succeed. It’s Donald Goines, Chester Himes, Abbey Lincoln, Marcus Garvey, Alfre Woodard, and the serious black actor. It’s Tiparillos, chitterlings, and a night in jail. It’s the crossover dribble and wearing house shoes outside. It’s “whereas” and “things of that nature.” It’s our beautiful hands and our fucked-up feet. Unmitigated Blackness is simply not giving a fuck. Clarence Cooper, Charlie Parker, Richard Pryor, Maya Deren, Sun Ra, Mizoguchi, Frida Kahlo, black-and-white Godard, Céline, Gong Li, David Hammons, Björk, and the Wu-Tang Clan in any of their hooded permutations. Unmitigated Blackness is essays passing for fiction. It’s the realization that there are no absolutes, except when there are. It’s the acceptance of contradiction not being a sin and a crime but a human frailty like split ends and libertarianism. Unmitigated Blackness is coming to the realization that as fucked up and meaningless as it all is, sometimes it’s the nihilism that makes life worth living. Sitting”
― Paul Beatty, The Sellout

“Like Nazis at a Ku Klux Klan rally, they were comfortable ideologically, but not in terms of corporate culture.”
― Paul Beatty, The Sellout

“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

“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

“The wretched of the Earth, he calls us. People too poor to afford cable and too stupid to know that they aren’t missing anything.”
― Paul Beatty, The Sellout

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“I sit in a thickly padded char that, much like this country, isn't quite as comfortable as it looks.”
― Paul Beatty, The Sellout