Hell of a Book Quotes

“Laugh all you want, but I think learning to love yourself in a country where you're told that you're the plague on the economy, that you're nothing but a prisoner in the making, that you life can be taken away from you at any moment and there's nothing you can do about it - learning to love yourself in the middle of all that? Hell, that's a goddamn miracle.”
― Jason Mott, Hell of a Book

“Anything worthwhile takes time. Maybe that's what time is for: to give meaning to the things we do; to create a context in which we can linger in something until, finally, we have given it something invaluable, something that we can never get back: time. And once we've invested the most precious commodity that we will ever have, it suddenly has meaning and importance. So maybe time is just how we measure meaning. Maybe time is how we best measure love.”
― Jason Mott, Hell of a Book

“All you really want is for the people around you to be safe. And there’s nobody in this world that you want safety for more than your children. So when you can’t give that to them, it swells up around your life. It swallows you up. You get afraid to let them leave the house because the monster of the world might come along and swallow them up. And the thing is that, eventually, that’s exactly what happens. Every child like you in this country has been swallowed up by the monster since before they were even born. And every Black parent in the history of this country has tried to stop that monster from swallowing them up and has failed at it. And every day they live with that.”
― Jason Mott, Hell of a Book

“The South is America’s longest running crime scene.”
― Jason Mott, Hell of a Book

“I’m not sure Black people can be happy in this world. There’s just too much of a backstory of sadness that’s always clawing at their heels. And no matter how hard you try to outrun it, life always comes through with those reminders letting you know that, more than anything, you’re just a part of an exploited people and a denied destiny and all you can do is hate your past and, by proxy, hate yourself”
― Jason Mott, Hell of a Book

“Lastly, a message to the Black boy that was: You are beautiful. Be kind to yourself, even when this country is not.”
― Jason Mott, Hell of a Book

“I consider Renny’s words and I look down at my black hands. “Do I have to write about being Black? What if I were an artist that only drew White characters? What would that say about me?” “What?” “I mean, White writers don’t have to write about being White. They can just write whatever books they want. But because I’m Black . . .” I pause to look at my hands and reaffirm that, yes, I really am Black. The story checks out. “. . . does that mean that I can only ever write about Blackness? Am I allowed to write about other things? Am I allowed to be something other than simply the color of my skin? I mean, I can’t quote it word for word, but isn’t that what the whole ‘I Have a Dream’ speech was about?”
― Jason Mott, Hell of a Book

“You will forget him.” He tried to find the words to say, “This boy is only the first of many that you will meet over your life. They will stack upon one another, week by week. You’ll try to keep them in your head but, eventually, you’ll become too full and they’ll spill out and be left behind. And then, one day, you’ll grow older and you’ll realize that you’ve forgotten his name—the name of the first dead Black boy that you promised yourself you wouldn’t forget—and you’ll hate yourself. You’ll hate your memory. You’ll hate the world. You’ll hate the way you’ve failed to stop the flow of dead bodies that have piled up in your mind. You’ll try to fix it, and fail, and you’ll drown in rage. You’ll turn on yourself for not fixing everything and you’ll drown in sadness. And you’ll do it over, and over, and over again for years and, one day, you’ll have a son and you’ll see him staring down the same road that you’ve been on and you’ll want to say something that fixes him, something that saves him from it all . . . and you won’t know what to say.”

William wanted to say all of the correct words to Soot, but they were not in his mind. All that was in William’s mind was the image of his son lying on the concrete, dead, just like all the boys that came and went on television.”
― Jason Mott, Hell of a Book

“The main problem I’ve found with dating is that, at some point in the process, you have to include other people. You have to actually interact with another human being. And when it comes to people . . . well . . . I’ve never really been a fan.”
― Jason Mott, Hell of a Book

“facts exist objectively, regardless of whether or not you believe them.”
― Jason Mott, Hell of a Book

“Memory and death are countries that know no geography.”
― Jason Mott, Hell of a Book

“Science has proven that there’s a limited number of people that we can ever actually care about.”
― Jason Mott, Hell of a Book

“But the thing to know and remember is that you can never be something other than what you are, no matter how much you might want to. You can't be them. You can only be you. And they're going to always treat you differently than they treat themselves. They won't ever know about it--at least, most of them won't. Most of them will think that everything is okay and that you're being treated well enough and that everything is beautiful. Because, I guess for them, all they can imagine is a world in which things are fair and beautiful because, after all, they've always been treated fairly and beautifully. History has always been kind to them.”
― Jason Mott, Hell of a Book

“Reality as a whole—past or present—just isn’t a good place to hang out, in my opinion”
― Jason Mott, Hell of a Book

“Laugh all you want, but I think learning to love yourself in a country where you’re told that you’re a plague on the economy, that you’re nothing but a prisoner in the making, that your life can be taken away from you at any moment and there’s nothing you can do about it—learning to love yourself in the middle of all that? Hell, that’s a goddamn miracle.”
― Jason Mott, Hell of a Book

“The whole world of my life spins under a radiant marquee of fear. Day in and day out it kills me, over and over and over again. Kills me dead, just to restart it all tomorrow. And all I can do about it is tell people I'm fine.”
― Jason Mott, Hell of a Book

“You're terrified right now. Scared all the way down to your socks. Because at some point you saw yourself on that little box in your living room - the same one that brought me into your world - and you started to believe the things you were told by people who truly didn't know you and were terrified of you. You saw pictures of yourself in prison, in riots, shooting other people who look like you, sacrificing yourself to the bloodthirsty monster just to save the hero - who looks nothing like you, by the way. And when you saw it all it built up a story in your brain, a story so convincing that it eventually swallowed up reality itself. And you started to think: 'Shit. Maybe that really is who I am. Maybe I really am the socio-narrative villain.' And that's when it happened."
"What happened?" I asked, breathless.
"You became terrified of yourself. You became afraid of your own voice. And I think you still are.”
― Jason Mott, Hell of a Book

“What you're really asking is whether or not you and I are the same person. And I'm not really sure that it matters. No. What matters here with me and you, Kid, is what we do with it all. What matters is how we feel about it, about one another, about ourselves. What matters is the fact that if it wasn't my dad that got shot and killed it was somebody else's dad. What matters is that if it wasn't you or me that got shot and killed, it was another kid.

And it's always someone in this world. That's the catch.”
― Jason Mott, Hell of a Book

“Post-Racial. Trans–Jim Crow. Epi-Traumatic. Alt-Reparational. Omni-Restitutional. Jingoistic Body-Positive. Sociocultural-Transcendental. Indigenous-Ripostic. Treaty of Fort Laramie–Perpendicular. Meta-Exculpatory. Pan-Political. Uber-Intermutual. MLK-Adjacent. Demi-Arcadian Bucolic. That is the vernacular of the inclusive, hyphenated, beau-American destiny we’re manifesting here! You and me! Book by book we’re making it happen! But it doesn’t happen by planting flags and picking at the scabbed-over wounds of a certain Dispossessed Neo-Global Cultural demographic committed at the hands of a onetime possibly improprietous proto-nation.”
― Jason Mott, Hell of a Book

“That's what the Fear really came down to. That's what all of the other fears were derived from for people of a certain skin color living in a certain place. But it wasn't just a fear, it was a truth. A truth proven time and time again for generations. A truth passed down through both myth and mandate, from lip-to-lip to legislation. Certain bodies don't belong to their inhabitants. Never have, never will again. A persistent, inescapable, and horrific truth known by millions of unsettled bodies. The Fear.”
― Jason Mott, Hell of a Book

“But the words we say never seem to live up to the ones inside our head.”
― Jason Mott, Hell of a Book

“The lanterns become small suns burning in the distance and I can believe, just for a moment, that all of us people are wandering the universe together as one. One of the truths we often overlook is that we are, all of us, always wandering the universe. We are perpetually hurtling on a rocky raft through the void, taking the tour of the cosmos at 67,000 miles per hour, every second of every day, and yet we still find time to stop and talk over bridges in the late hours of the night and maybe reach out and touch someone else's hand.”
― Jason Mott, Hell of a Book

“She's danced on water in life's late hours.”
― Jason Mott, Hell of a Book

“Live long enough,' I say, 'and you'll eventually see all sorts of things taken away from you, Kid. Toys, sandwiches, money, people, and eventually time. And the longer you go in life, the more you worry about something being taken away and you worry about going back to not having enough. We're all afraid of being poor, being injured, helpless, handicapped, all of the things that make us look at other people and say, "how bad. Somebody should do something to help them." The thing we're most afraid of is being the "them" in that equation.' I shake my head to push home the horror of what I'm saying to the Kid. I can't tell if he's understanding me or not. I can't tell if any of this is really getting through or if I just sound like another cynical heel. But this is the truth I know.”
― Jason Mott, Hell of a Book

“She wanted to have a child that could exist beyond it all. She wanted a child that could be free from it. A child that could never get shot. A child that didn’t have to be afraid. A child that she didn’t have to be afraid for because, at any moment, they could just disappear.”
― Jason Mott, Hell of a Book

“the future of this country is all about patriotic, unity-inducing language. Post-Racial. Trans–Jim Crow. Epi-Traumatic. Alt-Reparational. Omni-Restitutional. Jingoistic Body-Positive. Sociocultural-Transcendental. Indigenous-Ripostic. Treaty of Fort Laramie–Perpendicular. Meta-Exculpatory. Pan-Political. Uber-Intermutual. MLK-Adjacent. Demi-Arcadian Bucolic.”
― Jason Mott, Hell of a Book

“My mother is, more or less, a myth I carry around inside of me. She exists only because I can't conceive of a world in which she did not exist.”
― Jason Mott, Hell of a Book

“But how many books you read don’t make you a good or bad person. How many books you read is just how many books you read. My daddy didn’t read a whole lot of books. My mama either. But they were damn good people.”
― Jason Mott, Hell of a Book

“the”
― Jason Mott, Hell of a Book

“That fact is perhaps the greatest blessing of my life. Thank you to everyone who has ever learned to sing in a world that does not want to hear your voice. Lastly,”
― Jason Mott, Hell of a Book