Blacktop Wasteland Quotes

“Explanations were like assholes. Everyone has one and they are all full of shit.”
― S.A. Cosby, Blacktop Wasteland

“A mistake is a lesson, unless you make the same mistake twice.”
― S.A. Cosby, Blacktop Wasteland

“The only person who knew your weak spots better than the woman who raised you was the woman who shared your bed.”
― S.A. Cosby, Blacktop Wasteland

“Listen, when you’re a black man in America you live with the weight of people’s low expectations on your back every day. They can crush you right down to the goddamn ground. Think about it like it’s a race. Everybody else has a head start and you dragging those low expectations behind you. Choices give you freedom from those expectations. Allows you to cut ’em loose. Because that’s what freedom is. Being able to let things go. And nothing is more important than freedom. Nothing. You hear me, boy?” Beauregard said. Javon nodded his head. “Alright”
― S.A. Cosby, Blacktop Wasteland

“The truth had a strange way of ending an argument.”
― S.A. Cosby, Blacktop Wasteland

“The secret ain’t about the motor. That’s part of it, yeah, but that ain’t the main thing. The real thing, the thing most people don’t want to talk about, is how you drive. If you drive like you scared, you gonna lose. If you drive like you don’t want to have to rebuild the whole engine, you gonna lose. You gotta drive like don’t nothing else matter except getting to that line. Drive like you fucking stole it.”
― S.A. Cosby, Blacktop Wasteland

“Bye, Ronnie.” “Wait, what time you get off?” “About fifteen minutes after you roll off me and go to sleep,” Jenny said and hung up the phone.”
― S.A. Cosby, Blacktop Wasteland

“The thing about loving someone was that they knew all your pressure points. They knew all the spots that were open and raw. You let them into your heart and they cased the place.”
― S.A. Cosby, Blacktop Wasteland

“The Grim Reaper sneaks up behind you and squeezes you until shit fills your adult diaper and an artery bursts in your chest. He works his bony fingers in your guts and makes your own cells eat you alive from the inside. He skull fucks you until your brain retreats inside itself and you forget how to even breathe.”
― S.A. Cosby, Blacktop Wasteland

“Progress had left this part of town behind. It was abandoned just like the store. A blacktop wasteland haunted by the phantoms of the past.”
― S.A. Cosby, Blacktop Wasteland

“A father is a man who expects his son to be as good a man as he was meant to be. FRANK A. CLARK”
― S.A. Cosby, Blacktop Wasteland

“Take me in. Arrest me. But I ain’t giving you my money.”
― S.A. Cosby, Blacktop Wasteland

“didn’t call a fish dumb because it couldn’t climb a tree.”
― S.A. Cosby, Blacktop Wasteland

“He so crooked they gonna have to screw him into the ground when he dies,” Boonie”
― S.A. Cosby, Blacktop Wasteland

“My Daddy never lied about who or what he was. He owned it. I was the one who put him on a pedestal. He never climbed up there. But me? I lied all the time. I lied to you. I lied to myself. I thought I could be an outlaw part of the time and the rest of the time be a daddy and a husband. That was the lie. Truth is I’m an outlaw all”
― S.A. Cosby, Blacktop Wasteland

“Boonie, a man gotta be one thing or another. You either gonna run the yard or you gonna be running in the streets. Man can’t be two types of beasts,”
― S.A. Cosby, Blacktop Wasteland

“Boonie’s sitting on ten rolls of platinum for you.”
― S.A. Cosby, Blacktop Wasteland

“The needle on the temperature gauge was so far in the red, it needed to file for bankruptcy.”
― S.A. Cosby, Blacktop Wasteland

“His father used to say if they ever wrecked the only thing seat belts would do was make it hard for the undertaker to get them out the car.”
― S.A. Cosby, Blacktop Wasteland

“When he stepped off the porch, he could feel the sun beating down on him like he owed it money.”
― S.A. Cosby, Blacktop Wasteland

“It’s like my Daddy used to say. While they picking apples, I’m planting seeds.”
― S.A. Cosby, Blacktop Wasteland

“there was no honor among thieves. Boys in the game only respected you in direct proportion to how much they needed you divided by how much they feared you.”
― S.A. Cosby, Blacktop Wasteland

“He had a gun in every room of the house. They were like good friends who were always down to do bad things.”
― S.A. Cosby, Blacktop Wasteland

“One thing he’d learned about marriage was that a novelty fan was not the hill you wanted to die on if you could help it.”
― S.A. Cosby, Blacktop Wasteland

“Kelvin laughed. “He must do that for old times’ sake. Damn. So you caught between a wannabe Pablo Escobar chopping motherfuckers up and putting them in grease buckets and a redneck Walter White. When you fuck up you do it right.”
― S.A. Cosby, Blacktop Wasteland

“Listen, when you’re a black man in America you live with the weight of people’s low expectations on your back every day. They can crush you right down to the goddamn ground. Think about it like it’s a race. Everybody else has a head start and you dragging those low expectations behind you. Choices give you freedom from those expectations. Allows you to cut ’em loose. Because that’s what freedom is. Being able to let things go.”
― S.A. Cosby, Blacktop Wasteland

“now. He wondered if this was the day they finally rolled his mother out to that lovely exposed aggregate sidewalk and told him to take her. He could see the administrator telling him she didn’t have to go home but she had to get the hell out of there.”
― S.A. Cosby, Blacktop Wasteland

“office. He got out of the truck and immediately started sweating. The heat had gone from volcano to Hell in the span of twenty minutes.”
― S.A. Cosby, Blacktop Wasteland

“Years ago, the Powers That Be of Red Hill County tried to reinvent the former farming community as a mecca for manufacturing. They offered fat tax breaks to the corporations, and in turn the corporations offered the town hundreds of jobs. For a while it was a mutually beneficial relationship. Right up until the 2008 recession hit. This was right about the same time the corporations realized they could ship their plants overseas and cut expenses by half while doubling profits.”
― S.A. Cosby, Blacktop Wasteland

“The bass from the sound system in a nearby Chevelle was hitting him in his chest so hard, it felt like someone was performing CPR on him.”
― S.A. Cosby, Blacktop Wasteland