A N Whitehead Quotes

#1. 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

#2. The only way to know how long you are lost in the darkness is to be saved from it.

Colson Whitehead

#3. I always feel that I have two duties to perform with a parting guest: one, to see that he doesn't forget anything that is his; the other, to see that he doesn't take anything that is mine.

Alfred North Whitehead

#4. A general definition of civilization: a civilized society is exhibiting the fine qualities of truth, beauty, adventure, art, peace.

Alfred North Whitehead

#5. Nature, even in the act of satisfying anticipation, often provides a surprise.

Alfred North Whitehead

#6. It is failure that guides evolution; perfection provides no incentive for improvement, and nothing is perfect.

Colson Whitehead

#7. 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

#8. The whole of mathematics consists in the organization of a series of aids to the imagination in the process of reasoning.

Alfred North Whitehead

#9. Cherish your old apartments and pause for a moment when you pass them. Pay tribute, for they are the caretakers for your reinventions.

Colson Whitehead

#10. The fixed person for the fixed duties who in older societies was such a godsend, in future will be a public danger.

Alfred North Whitehead

#11. A man really writes for an audience of about ten persons. Of course if others like it, that is clear gain. But if those ten are satisfied, he is content.

Alfred North Whitehead

#12. Speak out in acts; the time for words has passed, and only deeds will suffice.

Alfred North Whitehead

#13. I think being a writer was a crappy job when you just had typewriters. It was crappy when we just had ink and paper. And it's sort of crappy now. It's always just you and the page. That doesn't change.

Colson Whitehead

#14. Seek simplicity but distrust it.

Alfred North Whitehead

#15. Above all things we must be aware of what I will call 'inert ideas'
- that is to say, ideas that are merely received into the mind
without being utilized, or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations.

Alfred North Whitehead

#16. One day a pickaninny was happy and the next the light was gone from them; in between they had been introduced to a new reality of bondage.

Colson Whitehead

#17. 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

#18. Mathematics as a science, commenced when first someone, probably a Greek, proved propositions about "any" things or about "some" things, without specifications of definite particular things.

Alfred North Whitehead

#19. 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

#20. Resentment was the hinge of her personality.

Colson Whitehead

#21. Ethnicity and morality can of course combine, giving the sense that "we" are "good" and "they" are "bad.

Hal Whitehead

#22. The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order. Life refuses to be embalmed alive. The more prolonged the halt in some unrelieved system of order, the greater the crash of the dead society.

Alfred North Whitehead

#23. The real history does not get written, because it is not in people's brains but in their nerves and vitals.

Alfred North Whitehead

#24. [In many circumstances,] the most important thing about a proposition is not that it be true, but that it be interesting.

Alfred North Whitehead

#25. It had been a humdrum couple of days, reaffirming his belief in reincarnation: everything was so boring that this could not be the first time he'd experienced it.

Colson Whitehead

#26. Nature's laws have to supersede man's law.

Mary Beth Whitehead

#27. It was the softest bed she had ever lain in. But then, it was the only bed she had ever lain in.

Colson Whitehead

#28. The only use of a knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present. The present contains all that there is. It is holy ground; for it is the past, and it is the future.

Alfred North Whitehead

#29. Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness. Thus religion is solitariness; and if you are never solitary, you are never religious.

Alfred North Whitehead

#30. What the learned world tends to offer is one second-hand scrap of information illustrating ideas derived from another second-hand scrap of information. The second-handedness of the learned world is the secret of its mediocrity.

Alfred North Whitehead