Born A Crime: Stories From A South African Childhood Quotes
"Whenever I see that I think, That’s rubbish. Getting thrown out of a moving car hurts way worse than that."
"By 'adopt' I mean it was forced on us. The white man was quite stern with the native. 'You need to pray to Jesus,' he said. 'Jesus will save you.'"
"If you’re Native American and you pray to the wolves, you’re a savage. If you’re African and you pray to your ancestors, you’re a primitive. But when white people pray to a guy who turns water into wine, well, that’s just common sense."
"Christian karaoke, badass action stories, and violent faith healers—man, I loved church."
"As much as I loved church, the idea of a nine-hour slog, from mixed church to white church to black church then doubling back to white church again, was just too much to contemplate."
"Race-mixing proves that races can mix—and in a lot of cases, want to mix."
"That Trevor child would come through like a bat out of hell, and his mom would be right there behind him."
"Living alone in the city, not being trusted and not being able to trust, my mother started spending more and more time in the company of someone with whom she felt safe."
"Where most children are proof of their parents' love, I was the proof of their criminality."
"People built homes the way they bought eggs: a little at a time."
"The story of Soweto is the story of the driveways. It’s a hopeful place."
"When we shit we forget our airs and our graces, we forget how famous or how rich we are. All of that goes away."
"You are never more yourself than when you’re taking a shit."
"It’s a powerful experience, shitting. There’s something magical about it, profound even."
"If that is all I accomplish, I’ve done enough."
"Even if he never leaves the ghetto, he will know that the ghetto is not the world."
"Learn from your past and be better because of your past, but don’t cry about your past."
"Life is full of pain. Let the pain sharpen you, but don’t hold on to it. Don’t be bitter."
"I wasn’t burning my eyebrows. I was creating fire."
"As a kid, I remember having that feeling all the time. Every time I got punished, as my mom was whooping my ass, I’d be thinking, Why did I just do that?"
"My relationship with my mom was like the relationship between a cop and a criminal in the movies—the relentless detective and the devious mastermind she’s determined to catch."
"Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord. —Colossians 3:20"
"Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child; the rod of discipline will remove it far from him. —Proverbs 22:15"
"The only way it backfired on her was that I constantly challenged and questioned her."
"One thing I respected about my mom was that she never left me in any doubt as to why I was receiving the hiding."
"Being chosen is the greatest gift you can give to another human being."
"That’s what apartheid did: It convinced every group that it was because of the other race that they didn’t get into the club."
"If you think too much about the ass-kicking your mom gave you, or the ass-kicking that life gave you, you’ll stop pushing the boundaries and breaking the rules."
"Look on the bright side," she said, laughing and pointing to the half of me covered in dark berry juice. "Now you really are half black and half white."
"Trevor, you're okay," she said. "Go and wash up. You're not hurt. You're hurt emotionally. But you're not hurt."
"Someone would cut us off in traffic. Abel would yell out the window. The other guy would honk and yell back. In a flash Abel would be out of our car, over to theirs, grabbing the guy through the driver’s-side window, screaming in his face, raising a fist."
"Revenge truly is sweet. It takes you to a dark place, but, man, it satisfies a thirst."
"He’d been beaten by a stranger in a way I don’t think he’d ever been beaten before."
"You think it’s a joke, but it’s not funny! It’s not funny!"
"At H. A. Jack, Valentine’s Day was used as a fundraiser."
"You pick a special person and you tell them that you love them, and they love you back."
"I waited for her there. All around me, love was in bloom."
"I felt like someone had taken a gun and shot holes in every part of me."
"Ever the outsider, I created my own strange little world."
"I wasn’t popular, but I wasn’t an outcast. I was everywhere with everybody, and at the same time I was all by myself."
"It was like I’d been hit by three successive waves of heartbreak, each one bigger than the last."
"I wanted to jump up and point at the TV and say, 'Are you people blind?! That’s me! Can you not see that that’s me?!'"
"I learned that even though I didn’t belong to one group, I could be a part of any group that was laughing."
"It’s like being in Congress. You know you have the votes before you go to the floor, but it’s still difficult because anything could happen."
"I spent the rest of the day and the next couple of weeks waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting for my mom to get the call."
"People don't want to be rich. They want to be able to choose. The richer you are, the more choices you have. That is the freedom of money."
"In the hood, even if you’re not a hardcore criminal, crime is in your life in some way or another."
"Crime succeeds because crime does the one thing the government doesn’t do: crime cares."
"Every country thinks their history is the most important, and that’s especially true in the West."
"I had an instinct for business, but at the time I knew nothing about music, which was odd for someone running a music-pirating business."
"Cash is the one thing everyone in the hood needs."
"KFC found the black people. KFC did not play games."
"McDonald’s, to me, tasted like America. McDonald’s is America."
"If black South Africans could go back in time and kill one person, Cecil Rhodes would come up before Hitler."
"It’s easy to be judgmental about crime when you live in a world wealthy enough to be removed from it."
"Everyone has different notions of right and wrong, different definitions of what constitutes crime, and what level of crime they’re willing to participate in."
"In the hood, someone’s always buying, someone’s always selling, and the hustle is about trying to be in the middle of that whole thing."
"You can say that you don’t pick sides, but eventually life will force you to pick a side."
"The hood has a gravitational pull. It never leaves you behind, but it also never lets you leave."
"Comfort provides a floor but also a ceiling."
"Hustling is to work what surfing the Internet is to reading. If you add up how much you read in a year on the Internet—tweets, Facebook posts, lists—you’ve read the equivalent of a shit ton of books, but in fact you’ve read no books in a year."
"My mom never gave me an inch. Anytime I got in trouble it was tough love, lectures, punishment, and hidings."
"The biggest thing in the hood is that you have to share. You can’t get rich on your own."
"I know you see me as some crazy old bitch nagging at you, but you forget the reason I ride you so hard and give you so much shit is because I love you. Everything I have ever done I’ve done from a place of love."
"If I don’t punish you, the world will punish you even worse. The world doesn’t love you."
"The way my mother always explained it, the traditional man wants a woman to be subservient, but he never falls in love with subservient women."
"He’s attracted to independent women. 'He’s like an exotic bird collector,' she said. 'He only wants a woman who is free because his dream is to put her in a cage.'"
"Relationships are not sustained by violence but by love. Love is a creative act. When you love someone you create a new world for them."
"My mother did that for me, and with the progress I made and the things I learned, I came back and created a new world and a new understanding for her."
"God spoke to me, Trevor. He told me, 'Patricia, I don’t do anything by mistake. There is nothing I give you that you cannot handle.'"