Joe R. Lansdale Quotes

I keep an ongoing list of my fifty favorite books, which I recalibrate whenever I discover a new one that seems to demand a spot there.

Read the book you do honestly feel a wish and curiosity to read.

I was raised in Mississippi, in a family and a community that identified as black, and I have the stories and the experiences to go with it. One of my great-great grandfathers was killed by a gang of white Prohibition patrollers.

You know the discrimination: African-Americans couldn't go to certain schools, they couldn't use certain restrooms, there were other kinds of routine biases against them.

I have been refused entrance on the buses because I would not pay my fare at the front and go around to the rear door to enter. That was the custom if the bus was crowded up to the point where the white passengers would start occupying.

My grandmother, when she was young, would've walked past shops where some folks had out a sign that said, 'No Mexicans or dogs allowed.'

Black people have been fighting for basic citizenship rights since the inception of the country.

'Slavery by Another Name' is an important book that I think all Americans should read, about how, following the end of slavery, a new system of racial and social control was born, known as 'convict leasing.'

I grew up in the once segregated South. I experienced forced integration during my formative school years. I lived the sacrifices, burdens, and tears. I also lived the moments of understanding, of acknowledgment, of fellowship and success. I saw my parents and grandparents coming home beaten down - and some of my friends beaten up.

For nearly a century and a half, this country deluded itself into thinking that its greatest calamity, the Civil War, had nothing to do with one of its greatest sins, enslavement. It deluded itself in this manner despite available evidence to the contrary.

Time begins the healing process of wounds cut deeply by oppression. We soothe ourselves with the salve of attempted indifference, accepting the false pattern set up by the horrible restriction of Jim Crow laws.

North as well as South, the Negroes have emerged from slavery into a serfdom of poverty and restricted rights.

The South is just a dark place, man.

As a child, I lived through and survived the segregated South. I sat at the back of the bus at a time when America wasn't yet as great as it could be. As a grown woman, I saw the first black president reach down a hand and touch the face of a child like I once was, lifting his eyes toward a better future.

I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.

Let us look at Jim Crow for the criminal he is and what he has done to one life multiplied millions of times over these United States and the world. He walks us on a tightrope from birth.

Never did I think I would live to see the day Jim Crow was resurrected, making repeat appearances in the South. And he has packed his bags, and he has moved North. Something is wrong.

A vote for George Wallace is a vote for the past and oppression.

Every red stripe in that flag represents the black man's blood that has been shed.

'Bleak House' remains a great novel for me, and I love 'David Copperfield.'

The history of blacks is complicated, fragmented, disturbing to contemplate - not a neat trail of challenges met or of felled trees blocking the path to the mountain top.

I was born in a ghetto on the North Side of Pittsburgh. I was born as Emmett Till was dying and the civil rights era was being born.

When I was a child, it was segregated, and I couldn't go across a fence to certain parts of Gainesville.

I can tell you as a black person in South Carolina whose grandparents grew up through Jim Crow, when you lose the courts and justice no longer becomes just, we're in a world of trouble.

'Mudbound,' you know, is about home. 'Mudbound' is about what it means to be a citizen, and 'Mudbound,' in fact, is set in this post-reconstruction era that we haven't really explored. You know, not since 'Sounder' have we even really explored that experience.