I Am Not Sidney Poitier Quotes

“Read. Always read. No one can take that away from you.”
― Percival Everett, I Am Not Sidney Poitier

“Why are people so fucked up?” I asked
“Maybe you do need college, Poiter,” Everett said. “You want to know why people are so fucked up? Son, that’s about the only question I can answer with even a small measure of authority. It’s because they’re people. People, my friend, are worse than anybody.”
― Percival Everett, I Am Not Sidney Poitier

“It’s a bitch, ain’t it? The things we assume.”
― Percival Everett, I Am Not Sidney Poitier

“I was, in life, to be a gambler, a risk taker, a swashbuckler, a knight. I accepted, then and there, my place in this world. I was a fighter of windmills. I was a chaser of whales.”
― Percival Everett, I Am Not Sidney Poitier

“Like most people I am smarter than some, dumber than others, skinnier than most, and fatter than a few, but none was ever more confused than I was. I flew with confusion always parallel to me, and a whole internal chase at my rear. The one matter that was not confusing to me, but seemed to escape all the others, was the fact that the only thing that was certain to become obsolete, would necessarily become wearied and worn, was the truth. I knew this in spite of the truth that I had had little truck with the truth in my life. It was not that I considered myself a resident in a den of lies, but rather that my history was shrouded and diced and soaking wet with hysteria and contradiction. Contradictions or no, my trajectory through life, though different from most, was, nonetheless, a trajectory.”
― Percival Everett, I Am Not Sidney Poitier

“She stared at the television. “Why is it that after all the bullets have bounced off Superman’s chest, he then ducks when the villain throws the empty gun at him?”
― Percival Everett, I Am Not Sidney Poitier

“These were sad people, and for the world I wanted to think of them as decent. Perhaps they were decent enough, but the place made them so offensive to me that all who lived there became there.”
― Percival Everett, I Am Not Sidney Poitier

“She had to know, and I’m certain she did, that even the simple matter of dark skin would be a cause of consternation for her parents. I came to imagine them as Ward and June Cleaver. I recalled my mother happening upon me watching that television show one afternoon. It launched her into such a fit of hysteria that I was afraid she might become pregnant again.
“How dare they put that propaganda on the television?” my mother barked. “But of course that’s what the box is for, isn’t it? Here is my black son sitting here in his black neighborhood watching some bucktoothed little rat and his washed-out, anally stabbed Nazi-Christian parents.”
“There’s a brother, too,” I said, being six or so and not really understanding the tirade.
“Oh, a brother, too. I see him there, an older lily white acorn fallen so close to the tree. Turn that crap off. No, leave it on. Study the problem, Not Sidney. Soak it in.” With that she marched off to make cookies.”
― Percival Everett, I Am Not Sidney Poitier

“don’t imagine that you have limitations.” “Don’t I?” “I’m sure you do, but don’t imagine it.”
― Percival Everett, I Am Not Sidney Poitier

“She wasn’t exactly kissing my ass and she wasn’t exactly flirting with me, but with a little shove she’d have shit on her nose and I’d have a date.”
― Percival Everett, I Am Not Sidney Poitier

“The examination:
1) Imagine a radical and formidable contextualism that derives from a hypostatization of language and that it anticipates a liquefied language, a language that exists only in its mode of streaming. How is a speaker to avoid the pull into the whirl of its nonoriented stream of language?
2) Is the I one's body? Is fantasy the specular image? And what does this have to do with the Borromean knot? In other words, why is there no symptom too big for its britches?
3) How might it feel to burn with missionary zeal? Don't be shy in your answer.
We students looked at each other with varying degrees of confusion, panic, and anger. And like idiots, we set to work. At least they did. I read the questions over and over and after the number 1 and 2 on my paper I wrote, I don't know. After the number 3 I wrote, Awful, then added, damn it.”
― Percival Everett, I Am Not Sidney Poitier

“Ted looked at Everett’s face. “Percival Everett. Didn’t you write a book called Erasure ?”
Everett nodded.
“I didn’t like it,” Ted said.
“Nor I,” Everett said. “I didn’t like writing it, and I didn’t like it when I was done with it.”
“Well, actually, I loved the novel in the novel. I thought that story was real gripping. You know, true to life.”
“I’ve heard that.”
― Percival Everett, I Am Not Sidney Poitier

“Why should I remain in college?"
"You've got me," he said without a pause.
"That's the best you can do?" I said.
"How much money do you have?"
"More than I know what to do with," I said, honestly.
Everett sighed. I could hear him lighting his cigar. "I suppose you could remain in school for the sex. I here there's a lot of it. Or not."
"What about an education?"
"Hell, you can read. You know where the library is.”
― Percival Everett, I Am Not Sidney Poitier