Top 100 Colson Whitehead Quotes
#1. It was the softest bed she had ever lain in. But then, it was the only bed she had ever lain in.
Colson Whitehead
#2. In the dank utility room deep in the subbasements of my personality, a little man wiped his hands on his overalls and pulled the switch: More.
Colson Whitehead
#3. You should have gone yourself, you ask for a Coke and they come back with orange drink. No one understands the martyrdom of the volunteers for the trip to food concession.
Colson Whitehead
#4. Maybe everything the slave catcher said was true, Cora thought, every justification, and the sons of Ham were cursed and the slave master performed the Lord's will. And maybe he was just a man talking to an outhouse door, waiting for someone to wipe her ass. -
Colson Whitehead
#5. The old woman had destroyed his family so thoroughly it couldn't have been accidental. It wasn't her niece's greed - the old woman had played a trick on them the whole time.
Colson Whitehead
#6. It is failure that guides evolution; perfection provides no incentive for improvement, and nothing is perfect.
Colson Whitehead
#7. The only way to know how long you are lost in the darkness is to be saved from it.
Colson Whitehead
#8. Here's a tip for new parents: Start lowering those expectations early, it's going to pay off later.
Colson Whitehead
#9. Since the night she was kidnapped she had been appraised and reappraised, each day waking upon the pan of a new scale. Know your value and you know your place in the order. To escape the boundary of the plantation was to escape the fundamental principles of your existence: impossible. It
Colson Whitehead
#11. Mark Spitz didn't ask about Harry. You never asked about the characters that disappeared from a Last Night story. You knew the answer. The plague had a knack for narrative closure.
Colson Whitehead
#12. Two white men in two days had their hands around her. Was this a condition of her freedom? Caesar
Colson Whitehead
#13. Stolen bodies working stolen land. It was an engine that did not stop, its hungry boiler fed with blood.
Colson Whitehead
#15. Life! What Inscrutable Card Shall Ye Throw Next Upon the Soft Felt of Our Days?
Colson Whitehead
#16. In death the negro became a human being. Only then was he the white man's equal. On
Colson Whitehead
#17. He told her that every one of her enemies, all the masters and overseers of her suffering, would be punished, if not in this world then the next, for justice may be slow and invisible, but it always renders its true verdict in the end.
Colson Whitehead
#18. All he felt now was envy. These people had expectations. Of the world, of the future, it didn't matter
expectation was such an innovative concept to him that he couldn't help but be a bit moved by what they were saying. Whatever that was.
Colson Whitehead
#19. The city knows you better than any living person because it has seen you when you are alone.
Colson Whitehead
#20. Pick your fights like you pick your nose: with complete awareness of where you are.
Colson Whitehead
#21. Did you know that smiling politely burns up the same amount of calories as speaking your mind.
Colson Whitehead
#22. He had met this sort of white man before, earnest and believing what came out of their mouths. The veracity of their words was another matter, but at least they believed them. The southern white man was spat from the loins of the devil and there was no way to forecast his next evil act.
Colson Whitehead
#23. Everyone was fucked up in their own way; as before, it was a mark of one's individuality.
Colson Whitehead
#24. The I-Remember-Whensters lumbered in with their musty catalogues of the bygone, dragging IVs of distilled nostalgia behind them on creaky wheels,
Colson Whitehead
#26. But who can resist the seductions of elevators these days, those stepping stones to Heaven, which make relentless verticality so alluring?
Colson Whitehead
#27. He is fat and pink. On the United Elevator Co. advertisements, they airbrush away the pocks in his cheeks, the red slivers in his nose. In person he is too flesh, a handful of raw meat. Dogs have been known to follow him, optimistic.
Colson Whitehead
#28. The white men were silent. As if they'd given up or decided that a small freedom was the worst punishment of all, presenting the bounty of true freedom into painful relief. One
Colson Whitehead
#29. I can't blame modern technology for my predilection for distraction, not after all the hours I've spent watching lost balloons disappear into the clouds. I did it before the Internet, and I'll do it after the apocalypse, assuming we still have helium and weak-gripped children.
Colson Whitehead
#30. They were up past dawn, crashed, were granted absolution in its secular manifestation of late checkout.
Colson Whitehead
#31. He embraced the runaways with desperate affection. Cora couldn't help but shrink away. Two white men in two days had their hands around her. Was this a condition of her freedom?
Colson Whitehead
#32. And what else but a being cursed with the burden of free will would wear a poncho.
Colson Whitehead
#35. I grew up reading the 'Village Voice' and wanting to be one of these multidisciplinary music writers, film writers, book writers. And I lucked out getting a job at the 'Voice' right after college.
Colson Whitehead
#36. Cora didn't know what optimistic meant. She asked the other girls that night if they were familiar with the word. None of them had heard it before. She decided that it meant trying.
Colson Whitehead
#37. When you talk about this trip, and you will, because it was quite a journey and you witnessed many things, there were ups and downs, sudden reversals of fortune and last-minute escapes, it was really something, you will see your friends nod in recognition.
Colson Whitehead
#38. Memory is the most malicious cutter of all, preserving, recasting, panning in slow motion across the awful bits so that we retain every detail.
Colson Whitehead
#39. By making a circle of themselves that separated the human spirits within from the degradation without. Noble
Colson Whitehead
#40. They rounded up the Indians in camps, the women and children and whatever they could carry on their backs, and marched them west of the Mississippi. The Trail of Tears and Death,
Colson Whitehead
#41. In other words, fiction is payback for those who have wronged you.
Colson Whitehead
#42. I write books and either people read them or they don't read them. The rise of Facebook or e-books doesn't change the difficulty level of writing sentences and thinking up new ideas.
Colson Whitehead
#43. The only time "early bloomer" has ever been applied to me is vis-a-vis my premature apprehension of the deep dread-of-existence thing. In all other cases, I plod and tromp along. My knuckles? Well dragged.
Colson Whitehead
#44. Sometimes a useful delusion is better than a useless truth.
Colson Whitehead
#45. Try to forget bit by bit, it will be easier on you. Leave it behind. Then the plane tilts in its escape and over the gray wing the city explodes into view with all its miles and spires and inscrutable hustle and as you try to comprehend this sight you realize that you were never really there at all.
Colson Whitehead
#46. She wasn't surprised when his character revealed itself - if you waited long enough, it always did. Like the dawn.
Colson Whitehead
#47. He spills his guts, it was the last sip that sent him over the edge but she has her hands full with her own loneliness, she's not about to take on his. Reach inside to muzzle the broken part of you that is now talking.
Colson Whitehead
#48. There will be no redemption because the men who run this place do not want redemption. They want to be as near to hell as they can.
Colson Whitehead
#49. Sometimes such an experience bound one person to another; just as often the shame of one's powerlessness made all witnesses into enemies.
Colson Whitehead
#50. Lesson: If you're going to view blinds as taxes, be a Republican about them.
Colson Whitehead
#52. The buttons of his dark blue uniform allude to an ongoing border dispute with his soft belly.
Colson Whitehead
#53. Optimism skipped out on the rent a while back, but the cynic in the penthouse won't leave until led out by marshals.
Colson Whitehead
#54. If you were a thing - a cart or a horse or a slave - your value determined your possibilities.
Colson Whitehead
#56. That's how the European tribes operate, she said. If they can't control it, they destroy it.
Colson Whitehead
#57. You go on about reasons," Cora said. "Call things by other names as if it changes what they are. But that don't make them true.
Colson Whitehead
#58. Crossing a single street transformed the way people talked, determined the size and condition of the homes, the dimension and character of the dreams.
Colson Whitehead
#59. You are a soulless monster whose fright mask is incapable of capturing human expressions.
Colson Whitehead
#60. She wondered why there were only two kinds of weather: hardship in the morning, and tribulation at night.
Colson Whitehead
#61. You need to be strong to survive the labor and to make us greater. We fatten hogs, not because it pleases us but because we need hogs to survive. But we can't have you too clever. We can't have you so fit you outrun us." She
Colson Whitehead
#62. Somewhere, years ago, she had stepped off the path of life and could no longer find her way back to the family of people.
Colson Whitehead
#63. Don't go searching for a subject, let your subject find you. You can't rush inspiration. ... Once your subject finds you, it's like falling in love. It will be your constant companion. Shadowing you, peeping in your windows, calling you at all hours to leave messages like, Only you understand me.
Colson Whitehead
#64. Tonight the song you always despised strides from the jukebox full-bodied and you hear the lyrics for the first time, understand the lyrics for the first time after all these years. This new you with an older soul. Now it's your favorite. All this time singing the wrong words.
Colson Whitehead
#65. Georgina hailed from Delaware and had that vexing way of Delaware ladies, delighting in puzzles.
Colson Whitehead
#66. As the years pass, Valentine observed, racial violence only becomes more vicious in its expression. It will not abate or disappear, not anytime soon, and not in the south.
Colson Whitehead
#68. To preempt rejection she dresses to exaggerate her difference when the true enemy is not the world's disdain but its indifference. He is surely the next item in a dreary procession and cannot be seen for all those previous disappointments.
Colson Whitehead
#70. Why do you watch TV shows - and keep watching them - if you don't like them? Terence asked.
Simple: Some days, all you have is gazing upon horror, and the small comfort of being surprised that it is not yours.
Colson Whitehead
#71. I write the books that I'm compelled to and I definitely learn things about the world when I write them, and I hope that other people get something out of them, enjoy them, see the world differently when they're done.
Colson Whitehead
#72. I'm here because I was born here and thus ruined for anywhere else, but I don't know about you.
Colson Whitehead
#73. The negro's story may have started in this country with degradation, but triumph and prosperity would be his one day.
Colson Whitehead
#74. When they got to Oklahoma there were still more white people waiting for them, squatting on the land the Indians had been promised in the latest worthless treaty. Slow learners, the bunch.
Colson Whitehead
#75. His legs remembered the correct position for squatting down with toys. He played. He fit the round male studs into the round female grooves. He got some thinking done as he hunkered down on his fallen-sleep legs.
Colson Whitehead
#76. see chains on another person and be glad they are not your own--such was the good fortune permitted colored people, defined by how much worse it could be at any moment.
Colson Whitehead
#78. There were plenty of things in the world that deserved to stay dead, yet they walked.
Colson Whitehead
#79. Poems were too close to prayer, rousing regrettable passions. Waiting for God to rescue you when it was up to you.
Colson Whitehead
#80. I live in Brooklyn. I moved here 14 years ago for the cheap rent. It was a little embarrassing because I was raised in Manhattan, and so I was a bit of a snob about the other boroughs.
Colson Whitehead
#81. New York City in life was much like New York City in death. It was still hard to get a cab, for example.
Colson Whitehead
#82. Growing up devouring horror comics and novels, and being inspired to become a writer because of horror novels, movies, and comic books, I always knew I was going to write a horror novel.
Colson Whitehead
#83. 'Sag Harbor' was a very different book for me. It changed the way I thought about books that I wanted to do.
Colson Whitehead
#84. Why should anyone else have it easy. Spoken like a true New Yorker.
Colson Whitehead
#85. She gulped the air like water, the night sky the best meal she had ever had, the starts made succulent and ripe after her time below.
Colson Whitehead
#86. What does the perfect elevator look like, the one that will deliver us from the cities we suffer now, these stunted shacks? We don't know because we can't see inside it, it's something we cannot imagine, like the shape of angels' teeth. It's a black box.
Colson Whitehead
#87. Freedom was a community laboring for something lovely and rare.
Colson Whitehead
#88. Slavery is a sin when whites were put to the yoke, but not the African. All men are created equal, unless we decide you are not a man.
Colson Whitehead
#89. What a world it is, Cora thought, that makes a living prison into your only haven. Was she out of bondage or in its web: how to describe the status of a runaway?
Colson Whitehead
#90. Well, imagine you are alone in a room....Are you the best, most special person in the room right now? Yes. That's the gift of being alone.
Colson Whitehead
#92. A plantation was a plantation; one might think one's misfortunes distinct, but the true horror lay in their universality.
Colson Whitehead
#94. It was time to get out of what Coach called "small-stack mentality." I no longer had to play like I was trying to escape the space station before it self-destructed, as the chirpy computer voice counted down.
Colson Whitehead
#95. All I truly know is that we rise and fall as one, one colored family living next door to one white family. We may not know the way through the forest, but we can pick each other up when we fall, and we will arrive together." -
Colson Whitehead
#96. Poetry and prayer put ideas in people's heads that got them killed, distracting them from the ruthless mechanism of the world.
Colson Whitehead
#97. The Four Questions?" "As put forth by Mettleheim: How did this happen? How could this happen? Is it exceptional? How will it be avoided in the future?
Colson Whitehead
#98. Weeks passed, but my Word-A-Day Calendar was stuck on motherfucker.
Colson Whitehead
#99. But we have all been branded even if you can't see it, inside if not without
Colson Whitehead
#100. Nowdays, Rosie the Rivetere was a former soccer mom who had just opened her own catering business when Last Night came down and her husband and kids were eaten by a parking attendant at the local megamall's discount- appliance emporium.
Colson Whitehead
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