31 Quotes by Kiese Laymon

I swear that white folks need to just shut the hell up sometimes. Y'all make it hard for everybody.

Y'all taught me that unacknowledged scars accumulated in battles won often hurt more than battles lost.

We are real black characters with real character, not the stars of American racist spectacle. Blackness is not probable cause.

Obama will win. We will win. Then we will continue to lose. And the right questions will never be honestly asked or answered, and it's all just too much.

Black is not a vice. Nor is segregation a virtue.

All my English teachers talked about the importance of finding "your voice." It always confused me because I knew we all had so many voices, so many audiences, and my teachers seemed only to really want the kind of voice that sat with its legs crossed, reading The New York Times.

Do you ever just feel lonely? I feel like I walk around the world raw, Kie. It's hard to open up when you're already open, and people just never get tired of sticking their nasty hands into that raw.

I'd never imagined Layla being in one emergency, much less emergencies. Part of it was Layla was a black girl and I was taught by big boys that black girls would be okay no matter what we did to them.

Wow. You a real fat asshole for that right there. You don't know better that to throw rocks at love?