Top 50 Percival Everett Quotes (2026 Update)

1. “A metaphor cannot be paraphrased.”

— Percival Everett

2. “Read. Always read. No one can take that away from you.”

— Percival Everett

3. “It’s okay to love something bigger than yourself without fearing it. Anything worth loving is bigger than we are anyway.”

— Percival Everett

4. “It had a rear bumper sticker that read Legalize Recreational Plutonium.”

— Percival Everett

5. “He resisted the urge to let satire ring through his voice.”

— Percival Everett

6. “Why will I bury you? So that one day I might disturb your grave.”

— Percival Everett

7. “I don’t think meaning exists without form, and certainly form does not exist without meaning. Meaning and story come first. Story is the most important part of fiction. Without it, what’s the point? If all you care about is form, become a critic.”

— Percival Everett

8. “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

9. “Everybody talks about genocides around the world, but when the killing is slow and spread over a hundred years, no one notices. Where there are no mass graves, no one notices. American outrage is always for show. It has a shelf life.”

— Percival Everett

10. “And though I missed my lover, I was not sad. I was satisfied. I was different.”

— Percival Everett

11. “You should know I consider police shootings to be lynchings.”

— Percival Everett

12. “What’s your dog’s name?” “Oh, he ain’t got no name.” “Why’s that?” “I don’t like names,” the man said, looking down at his pet. “How do you call it?” Jim asked. “Call it?”

— Percival Everett

13. “People should know, understand that not all Thursdays are the same.”

— Percival Everett

14. “The lie felt good because I had taken control of the narrative around me. The.”

— Percival Everett

15. “Now here he was, tailored iron-gray suit, thin maroon tie, a maroon handkerchief peeking out from his breast pocket. His oxblood wing tips gleamed. He looked like a supervillain or, worse, an upper-crust English spy, an openly promiscuous and functionally alcoholic heterosexual with an on-and-off-again messiah complex. It was the shoes, the way they were tied.”

— Percival Everett

16. “It’s almost noon, Trig,” I said. “We’ve nearly run out of morning. A sad thought, morning being my favorite part of the day. My least favorite part of the day is from 2:34 to 4:56 in the afternoon.”

— Percival Everett

17. “Way I sees it is dis. If’n ya gots to hab a rule to tells ya wha’s good, if’n ya gots to hab good ’splained to ya, den ya cain’t be good. If’n ya need sum kinda God to tells ya right from wrong, den you won’t never know.”

— Percival Everett

18. “I am the angel of death, come to offer sweet justice in the night. I am a sign I am your future. I am James.”

— Percival Everett

19. “I considered the northern white stance against slavery. How much of the desire to end the institution was fueled by a need to quell and subdue white guilt and pain? Was it just too much to watch? Did it offend Christian sensibilities to live in a society that allowed that practice? I knew that whatever the cause of their war, freeing slaves was an incidental premise and would be an incidental result.”

— Percival Everett

20. “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

21. “Belief has nothing to do with truth.”

— Percival Everett

22. “Hannibal. I’m looking for the Graham farm.” “The breeder?” he asked. “What do you mean?” “Graham’s a breeder. He breeds slaves and sells them.” “My wife and daughter were taken there.” The man was silent.”

— Percival Everett

23. “The children said together, “And the better they feel, the safer we are.” “February, translate that.” “Da mo’ betta dey feels, da mo’ safer we be.” “Nice.”

— Percival Everett

24. “Of all possible worlds this was the one in which I had landed.”

— Percival Everett

25. “As a matter of fact, just recently I passed for white so I could pass for black.”

— Percival Everett

26. “I can tell you that I am a man who is cognizant of his world, a man who has a family, who loves a family, who has been torn from his family, a man who can read and write, a man who will not let his story be self-related, but self-written.”

— Percival Everett

27. “Unknown Male is a name,” the old woman said. “In a way, it’s more of a name than any of the others. A little more than life was taken from them.”

— Percival Everett

28. “I hated the world that wouldn’t let me apply justice without the certain retaliation of injustice.”

— Percival Everett

29. “With my pencil, I wrote myself into being. I wrote myself to here.”

— Percival Everett

30. “I felt tired of the failures of men. They were always failing in the most basic ways, like looking down or away at the moment when they should be gutsy enough to meet your eye.”

— Percival Everett

31. “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

32. “We’re slaves. We’re not anywhere. Free person, he can be where he wants to be. The only place we can ever be is in slavery.”

— Percival Everett

33. “But in this notebook I would reconstruct the story I had begun, the story I kept beginning, until I had a story.”

— Percival Everett

34. “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

35. “I am a sign. I am your future. I am James.”

— Percival Everett

36. “There was a mama raccoon that lived in the tree. She had taken to walking past me nonchalantly in the darkness. Tonight she stayed in the tree, high above me, listening to the dogs. We were both animals and we didn’t know which of us was the prey. We accepted that we both were.”

— Percival Everett

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

— Percival Everett

38. “I suspected at that moment that I would not die, but it was unclear whether I would be pleased about that fact.”

— Percival Everett

39. “With my pencil, I wrote myself into being.”

— Percival Everett

40. “What you’re saying is that if someone pays you enough, it’s okay to abandon what you have claimed to understand as moral and right.”

— Percival Everett

41. “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

42. “Religion is just a controlling tool they employ and adhere to when convenient.”

— Percival Everett

43. “Babies are smarter than us. It seems they’re always trying to kill themselves. That’s why we have to watch them every second, so they don’t swallow nickels or drink weed killer or eat Tylenol like candy. Then we get stupid and want to live.”

— Percival Everett

44. “Dey takes the lies dey want and throws away the truths dat scares ’em.”

— Percival Everett

45. “He could have gone through life without the knowledge I had given him and he would have been no worse off for it. But I understood at that moment that I had shared the truth with him for myself. I needed for him to have a choice.”

— Percival Everett

46. “Huck nodded. “You know where we goin’?” the boy asked. “Ain’t got no idee. But we’s on our way.” –.”

— Percival Everett

47. “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

48. “What did I do? I’m a slave, Norman. I inhaled when I should have exhaled. What did I do?”

— Percival Everett

49. “I did not look away. I wanted to feel the anger. I was befriending my anger, learning not only how to feel it, but perhaps how to use it.”

— Percival Everett

50. “A reiteration of the obvious is never wasted on the oblivious.”

— Percival Everett