Colson Whitehead Quotes

#1. In her Georgia misery she had pictured freedom, and it had not looked like this. Freedom was a community laboring for something lovely and rare. Mingo

Colson Whitehead

#2. 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

#3. Sometimes a useful delusion is better than a useless truth.

Colson Whitehead

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. This isn't going to un-fuck itself.

Colson Whitehead

#7. In other words, fiction is payback for those who have wronged you.

Colson Whitehead

#8. It was a gorgeous and intricate delusion, Manhattan, and from crooked angles on overcast days you saw it disintegrate, were forced to consider this tenuous creature in its true nature.

Colson Whitehead

#9. 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

#10. By making a circle of themselves that separated the human spirits within from the degradation without. Noble

Colson Whitehead

#11. Things are pretty much status quo with the sexual-tension friend.

Colson Whitehead

#12. They will have to destroy this city once we deliver the black box. The current bones will not accommodate the marrow of the device. They will have to raze the city and cart off the rubble to less popular boroughs and start anew.

Colson Whitehead

#13. 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

#14. White man trying to kill you slow every day, and sometimes trying to kill you fast. Why make it easy for him? That was one kind of work you could say no to.

Colson Whitehead

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. He told himself: Hope is a gateway drug, don't do it.

Colson Whitehead

#18. I'd never been much of an athlete, due to a physical condition I'd had since birth (unathleticism). Perhaps if there were a sport centered around lying on your couch in a neurotic stupor all day, I'd take an interest.

Colson Whitehead

#19. 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

#20. Whoever has the better stuff wins. Sound familiar, American lackeys of late-stage capitalism?

Colson Whitehead

#21. Judge not the dysfunctions of others, let ye be judged.

Colson Whitehead

#22. He was a rube, but he was no tourist.

Colson Whitehead

#23. What isn't said is as important as what is said.

Colson Whitehead

#24. The world is mean from the start and gets meaner every day. It uses you up until you only dream of death. Mabel

Colson Whitehead

#25. And what else but a being cursed with the burden of free will would wear a poncho.

Colson Whitehead

#26. Their lives had been an interminable loop of repeated gestures; now their existences were winnowed to this discrete and eternal moment.

Colson Whitehead

#27. That's how the European tribes operate, she said. If they can't control it, they destroy it.

Colson Whitehead

#28. No, Fulton was colored. She understands this luminous truth. Natchez did not lie about that: she has seen it in the man's books, made plain by her new literacy. In the last few days she has learned how to read, like a slave does, one forbidden word at a time.

Colson Whitehead

#29. He hovered on unexceptionality.

Colson Whitehead

#30. Suck it, Entropy. We have an appointment, my old friend, but not today.

Colson Whitehead

#31. The doctor was a frequent visitor at Miss Trumball's establishment, preferring it to the Lanchester house, whose girls had a saturnine disposition in his opinion, as if imported from Maine or other gloom-loving provinces.

Colson Whitehead

#32. If you were a thing - a cart or a horse or a slave - your value determined your possibilities.

Colson Whitehead

#33. He was a mediocre man. He had led a mediocre life exceptional only in the magnitude of its unexceptionality. Now the world was mediocre, rendering him perfect. He asked himself: How can I die? I was always like this. Now I am more me. He had the ammo. He took them all down.

Colson Whitehead

#34. But it's like riding a bike. A hell-bike, made out of hell.

Colson Whitehead

#35. I'm just trying to keep things rich for me creatively and for the readers who follow me.

Colson Whitehead

#36. New York City does not hold our former selves against us. Perhaps we can extend the same courtesy.

Colson Whitehead

#37. 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

#38. Every state is different,' Lumbly was saying. 'Each one a state of possibility, with its own customs and way of doing things. Moving through them, you'll see the breadth of the country before you reach your final stop.

Colson Whitehead

#39. 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

#40. Yet when his classmates put their blades to a colored cadaver, they did more for the cause of colored advancement than the most high-minded abolitionist. In death the negro became a human being. Only then was he the white man's equal.

Colson Whitehead

#41. The buttons of his dark blue uniform allude to an ongoing border dispute with his soft belly.

Colson Whitehead

#42. Maybe we become New Yorkers the day we realize that New York will go on without us.

Colson Whitehead

#43. Don't be afraid: you have a best seller on your hands.

Colson Whitehead

#44. Lesson: If you're going to view blinds as taxes, be a Republican about them.

Colson Whitehead

#45. 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

#46. 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

#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. She wasn't surprised when his character revealed itself - if you waited long enough, it always did. Like the dawn.

Colson Whitehead

#49. A lot of my writer friends live near me, and that makes people think we just hang around with one another in cafes, trading work and discussing 'Harper's' and what not. But I rarely see them. We're home working.

Colson Whitehead

#50. If I have three ideas and I'm working on one more than the others, that sort of tells me that I should work on that one.

Colson Whitehead

#51. Here's a tip for new parents: Start lowering those expectations early, it's going to pay off later.

Colson Whitehead

#52. In death the negro became a human being. Only then was he the white man's equal. On

Colson Whitehead

#53. Life! What Inscrutable Card Shall Ye Throw Next Upon the Soft Felt of Our Days?

Colson Whitehead

#54. I feel about my phone the way horror-movie ventriloquists feel about their dummies: It's smarter than me, better than me, and I will kill anyone who comes between us.

Colson Whitehead

#55. A monster is a person who has stopped pretending.

Colson Whitehead

#56. Stolen bodies working stolen land. It was an engine that did not stop, its hungry boiler fed with blood.

Colson Whitehead

#57. I was inspired to become a writer by horror movies and science fiction.

Colson Whitehead

#58. Two white men in two days had their hands around her. Was this a condition of her freedom? Caesar

Colson Whitehead

#59. 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

#60. of a runaway? Freedom was a thing that shifted as you looked at it, the way a forest is dense with trees up close but from outside, from the

Colson Whitehead

#61. You can't rush inspiration.

Colson Whitehead

#62. 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

#63. In the slow motion that is the speed of humiliation.

Colson Whitehead

#64. 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

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

Colson Whitehead

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

Colson Whitehead

#67. 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

#68. 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

#69. 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

#70. 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

#71. 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

#72. 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

#73. Resentment was the hinge of her personality.

Colson Whitehead

#74. 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

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

Colson Whitehead

#76. 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

#77. Live every minute as if you are late for the last train.

Colson Whitehead

#78. Later he decided the specifics were not important, that the true lesson of accidents is not the how or the why, but the taken-for-granted world they exile you from.

Colson Whitehead

#79. They were up past dawn, crashed, were granted absolution in its secular manifestation of late checkout.

Colson Whitehead

#80. 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

#81. 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

#82. If you want to see what this nation is all about, you have to ride the rails. Look outside as you speed through, and you'll find the true face of America. It was a joke, then, from the start. There was only darkness outside the windows on her journeys, and only ever would be darkness.

Colson Whitehead

#83. In his mind, the business of existence was about minimizing consequences. The plague had raised the stakes, but he had been in training for this his whole life.

Colson Whitehead

#84. And if you could make a study of the dead, Stevens thought from time to time, you could make a study of the living, and make them testify as no cadaver could.

Colson Whitehead

#85. 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

#86. But who can resist the seductions of elevators these days, those stepping stones to Heaven, which make relentless verticality so alluring?

Colson Whitehead

#87. Three cheers for your rich interior life, may it serve you well come rent day.

Colson Whitehead

#88. memory has a palette and broad brush.

Colson Whitehead

#89. 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

#90. Everyone was fucked up in their own way; as before, it was a mark of one's individuality.

Colson Whitehead

#91. 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

#92. Talking about New York is a way of talking about the world.

Colson Whitehead

#93. Tipple sold his success much more effectively than he did. How to get excited about, take pride in something that came so naturally? It was like being honored for breathing.

Colson Whitehead

#94. Did you know that smiling politely burns up the same amount of calories as speaking your mind.

Colson Whitehead

#95. At ninety, everything is air and the difference between you and the medium of your passage is disintegrating with every increment of the ascension.

Colson Whitehead

#96. They don't give gold bracelets for regrets.

Colson Whitehead

#97. Pick your fights like you pick your nose: with complete awareness of where you are.

Colson Whitehead

#98. The city knows you better than any living person because it has seen you when you are alone.

Colson Whitehead

#99. We never see other people anyway, only the monsters we make of them.

Colson Whitehead

#100. 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