Top 100 Quotes About Whiteness
#1. Confront the page that taunts you with its whiteness. Face your enemy and fill it with words. You are bigger and stronger than a piece of paper.
Fennel Hudson
#2. The white men of the South had better make up their minds that the blacks will remain in the South just as long as corn will tassel and cotton will bloom into whiteness.
Timothy Thomas Fortune
#3. Chefs don't use white pepper just to avoid spoiling the whiteness of pommes puree or bechamel. It has a more peppery aroma, with sharpness and sweetness, too.
Yotam Ottolenghi
#4. When I ache to live, my mind loves to stay with the peaceful whiteness of a pigeon's care...in boundless amity..
Munia Khan
#5. The winter street is a salt cave. The snow has stopped falling and it's very cold. The cold is spectacular, penetrating. The street has been silenced, a theatre of whiteness, drifts like frozen waves. Crystals glisten under the streetlights.
Anne Michaels
#6. Whiteness has been, above all, a racial formation that presupposed and reproduced relations of inequality and domination between "whites" and their racial others.
Moon-kie Jung
#7. I write very rarely. Only, in fact, when the sheet of paper suffers an existential crisis and threatens, if I don't surrender to it, to bury me alive under its whiteness.
Kiki Dimoula
#8. Whiteness is the color of death, you know, not black. Wetness is life, the breeder and shaper of life. In the beginning the sun was black. So all light was absorbed before it had a chance to return. And our dreams, then, were empty.
Jim Carroll
#9. In other words, is "critical whiteness studies" the Trojan horse through which the study and perspective of whites will be recentered in studies of race and ethnicity?1
Birgit Brander Rasmussen
#10. To call the Form [of the Good] eternal is misleading: that something lasts forever does not render it any the better, any more than long-enduring whiteness is whiter than ephemeral whiteness.
Alasdair MacIntyre
#11. It's not whiteness itself that sets Them against Us, but the worship of whiteness. Same goes if you swap whiteness out for other things
fancy possessions for sure, pedigree, maybe youth too ... we beat Them (and spare ourselves a lot of tedium and terror) by declining to worship.
Helen Oyeyemi
#12. If whiteness were of no particular advantage, then having a fuller color wheel of skin tones would be purely a matter of celebration. But whiteness - just a drop of it - does still carry privilege. You learn that very young in America.
Eric Liu
#13. The contemplation of Mont Blanc's unchanging summits for three or four days last month, the sight of that eternal snow, immaculate, sublime in its whiteness and calm, was enough to restore to my soul a serenity it had not known for a long time.
George Sand
#14. The "freedom movement" is a racist movement as such. But it's a virulent example of identity politics. "Whiteness" is part of the identity, but not the most important part.
Hendrik Hertzberg
#15. If half-black Barack Obama had decided years ago to call himself white - which his genes certainly entitled him to do - his story would have carried very different meaning. If millions of part-black people had followed him into whiteness, then the N.A.A.C.P. would be in true crisis.
Eric Liu
#16. Im not really about blackness, per se, but about blackness and whiteness, and what they mean and how they interact with one another and what power is all about.
Kara Walker
#17. This is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America - this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible.
Langston Hughes
#18. You cross the field in the snow leaving tracks in perfect whiteness ... disturbing my placid universe ... marking the landscape within me ...
John Geddes
#19. Now, on the contrary, here he was , plunged into a whiteness so luminous, so total, that it swallowed up rather than absorbed, not just colours, but the very things and beings , thus making them twice as invisible
Jose Saramago
#20. I dissolved, so white, so unapproachable, amid my white flame, in the whiteness of moonlight
Giannis Ritsos
#21. Faded the flower and all its budded charms,Faded the sight of beauty from my eyes,Faded the shape of beauty from my arms,Faded the voice, warmth, whiteness, paradise!Vanishd unseasonably
John Keats
#22. I wandered out like a haggard ghost, and there she was, Frisco - long, bleak streets with trolley wires all shrouded in fog and whiteness. I stumbled around a few blocks. Weird bums (Mission and Third) asked me for dimes in the dawn.
Jack Kerouac
#23. Through the cold time she holds me with evergreen devotion she bears up my whiteness.
Earle Birney
#24. Not surprisingly, thinkers from groups for whom whiteness was and is a problem have taken the lead in studying whiteness in this way. Such study began with slave folktales and American Indian stories of contact with whites.
David Roediger
#25. I don't think people in America understand race, and how deep the hooks of whiteness there are in our consciousness.
Eddie Huang
#26. A treble clef, for example, resembles a Muscovite or Leningrader in a bulky hooded parka. A bass clef bends as simply and painfully as a silhouetted widow in Leningrad drawing water from the whiteness of a frozen canal.
William T. Vollmann
#27. The rice grain suffers under the blow of the pestle. But admire its whiteness once the order is over. So it is with men and the world we live in. To be a man one must suffer the blows of misfortune.
Ho Chi Minh
#28. And there were two moons; the clock moon with four faces in four night directions above the solemn black courthouse, and the real moon rising in vanilla whiteness from the dark east.
Ray Bradbury
#29. ...great eager mists flock to heaven laden with lore, and oceanward eyes on the rocks see only a mystic whiteness, as if the cliff's rim were the rim of all earth, and the solemn bells of buoys tolled free in the aether of faery.
H.P. Lovecraft
#30. You & I, Love, together we ratify the silence,
while the sea destroys its perpetual statues,
collapses its towers of wild speed and whiteness:
because in the weavings of those invisible fabrics,
galloping water, incessant sand,
we make the only permanent tenderness.
Pablo Neruda
#31. Noon is a disguise of whiteness put on by the eternal Night behind it.
Gregory Maguire
#32. Whiteness of moonlight builds a house that is not there
Kathleen Raine
#33. I stare up at whiteness. When I was young, I thought that was what heaven would be like, all white light and nothing else. Now I know that can't be true, because white light is menacing.
Veronica Roth
#34. When I go to one of those singles dating parties I believe myself to be a bowl of fruit. When I talk to potential dates, I judge them by the smile in their lips, their smoothness of speech, and the whiteness of teeth; then I offer them the appropriate fruit, which is usually a lemon.
Amanda Holden
#35. I look at my four boys, who are the colors of silt, loam, dust, and clay, an infinite palette for children of their own, and I understand that time erases whiteness altogether.
Barbara Kingsolver
#36. Michal too would catch one last glimpse of him in a dream. In 1958 she told a friend: I dreamt of Charles the other night. He was standing on a niche in a cathedral I could not identify. His garments were beyond whiteness & he looked very very grave & he looked & looked at me.1526
Grevel Lindop
#37. Her cheeks were bright with a soft vermilion of the pomegranate mingling with the whiteness of the lily.
Aleister Crowley
#38. I turn a corner," I offered, "just as someone ahead of me turns the next corner. I can't see what that person looks like. All I can make out is a flash of white coattails. But the whiteness of the coattails is indelibly etched in my consciousness. Ever get that feeling?
Haruki Murakami
#39. The way that is bright seems dull. The way forward seems to lead back. The smooth way seems rough. The highest virtue seems a valley. The purest whiteness seems stained. Excessive virtue seems defective. Solid virtue seems inactive.
Lao-Tzu
#40. We are nearer neighbors to ourselves than the whiteness of snow or the weight of stones are to us: if man does not know himself, how should he know his functions and powers?
Michel De Montaigne
#41. The translation process becomes a highly subjective thing - turning reds and blues into black-and-whiteness. It's really bizarre for me.
Robert Longo
#42. For a moment I was filled with the sensation of white snow against black water. The way the whiteness erases all the detail around a lake or a river in the forest so that the difference between land and water is absolute, and the water lies there as a deeply alien entity, a black hole in the world.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#43. The Disco Group ABBA": They were beards and teeth and natural breasts and whiteness. I
Chuck Klosterman
#44. As white women ignore their built-in privilege of whiteness and define woman in terms of their own experience alone, then women of Color become "other," the outsider whose experience and tradition is too "alien" to comprehend.
Audre Lorde
#45. What I was pointing to was that, yeah, blackness is a fiction; whiteness is a fiction. When we live according to these categories, we're living within a fiction. Of course, it's a fiction with very real consequences.
Jess Row
#46. We are nearer neighbours to ourselves than whiteness to snow, or weight to stones.
Michel De Montaigne
#47. Again and again, I find something eerie in many Irish occasions - the unrelenting whiteness, the emotional tribal attachments, the violent prejudices lurking beneath apparently pleasant social surfaces, the cosy smugness of belonging.
Tom Paulin
#48. The emptiness is so intense, that anything which enters it leaves a trace, something of it remains in space: in the silence, in the whiteness, nothingness becomes peopled, too.
Marie Darrieussecq
#49. I think the idea that you're somehow rejecting whiteness if you don't identify yourself as biracial is odd because everybody engages in whiteness. If you live in America, you're doing whiteness all the time, even if you have no white people in your family.
Melissa Harris-Perry
#50. He had kept The whiteness of his soul, and thus men o'er him wept.
Lord Byron
#51. No one who has seen an angel ever mistakes it for a ghost. Angels are remarkable for their warmth and light, and all who see them speak in awe of their irridescent and refulgent light, of brilliant colors, or else of the unbearable whiteness of their being. You are flooded with laughter, happiness.
Sophy Burnham
#52. I know the anger lies inside of me like I know the beat of my heart and the taste of my spit. It is easier to be furious than to be yearning. Easier to crucify myself in you than to take on the threatening universe of whiteness by admitting that we are worth wanting each other.
Audre Lorde
#53. The brilliance of the rose and the whiteness of the lily do not lessen the perfume of the violet or the sweet simplicity of the daisy.
Therese De Lisieux
#54. I sit in the sky like a sphinx misunderstood; My heart of snow is wed to the whiteness of swans; I hate the movement that displaces the rigid lines, With lips untaught neither tears nor laughter do I know.
Charles Baudelaire
#55. Early impressions are hard to eradicate from the mind. When once wool has been dyed purple, who can restore it to its previous whiteness?
Jerome
#56. I have marked
A thousand blushing apparitions
To start into her face, a thousand innocent shames
In angel whiteness beat away those blushes;
And in her eye there hath appeared a fire,
To burn the errors that these Princes hold
Against her Maiden truth.
William Shakespeare
#57. I wondered if whiteness were contagious. If it were, then surely I had caught it. I imagined this "condition" affected the way I walked, talked, dressed, danced, and at its most advanced stage, the way I looked at the world and at other people.
Danzy Senna
#58. My walls no longer protect me. They never protected me. Their solidity is mere illusion, their whiteness is stained
Agota Kristof
#59. Whiteness is not really a color at all, but a set of power relations.
Charles W. Mills
#60. The sigh of all the seas breaking in measure round the isles soothed them; the night wrapped them; nothing broke their sleep, until, the birds beginning and the dawn weaving their thin voices in to its whiteness
Virginia Woolf
#61. Butterflies have always had wings; people have always had legs. While history is marked by the hybridity of human societies & the desire for movement, the reality of most of migration today reveals the unequal relations between rich & poor, between North and South, between whiteness and its others.
Harsha Walia
#62. We live surrounded by white images, and white in this world is synonymous with the good, light, beauty, success, so that, despite ourselves sometimes, we run after that whiteness and deny our darkness, which has been made into the symbol of all that is evil and inferior.
Paule Marshall
#63. The man who in this world can keep the whiteness of his soul is not likely to lose it in any other.
Alexander Smith
#64. These pearls are orient, but they yield in whiteness to your teeth; the diamonds are brilliant, but they cannot match your eyes; and ever since I have taken up this wild trade, I have made a vow to prefer beauty to wealth.
Walter Scott
#65. No matter how much time I spend here I can't escape the whiteness of my skin, the way I stand out no matter what I do. But it's more than my skin. It's my privilege.
Jessica Posner
#66. To Ishmael, the whale's indefinite whiteness' shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation. [It's] a color-less, all-color of atheism from which we shrink.
Herman Melville
#67. The anti-blackness has generated new forms of youth involvement in anti-whiteness, which in some cases is appalling.
Alex Haley
#68. We flew throughout the summer and fall and the start of winter. At first the whiteness gave way to the green of summer, and then gold covered the fields and forests, and then the whiteness again.
Anatoly Berezovoy
#69. Color is nothing, I do not even notice it, I know only one thing, which is the purity of my conscience and the whiteness of my soul.
Frantz Fanon
#71. The coming of Christ means a denial of what we thought we were. It means destroying the white devil in us. Reconciliation to God means that white people are prepared to deny themselves (whiteness), take up the cross (blackness) and follow Christ (black ghetto).
James H. Cone
#72. Since I got to this country when I was 12, I've been obsessed with this idea of whiteness and blackness because I realized I was neither. For me, it was so important to me to make a film that focused on whiteness because you wouldn't have blackness if you didn't have whiteness.
Jose Antonio Vargas
#73. There can be no whiter whiteness than this one: An insurance man's shirt on its morning run.
Gwendolyn Brooks
#74. Only she began to be afraid of the ghastly white tombstones, that peculiar loathsome whiteness of Carrara marble, detestable as false teeth, which stuck up on the hillside, under Tevershall church, and which she saw with such grim painfulness from the park.
D.H. Lawrence
#75. That virtue therefore which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure; her whiteness is but an excremental whiteness.
John Milton
#76. A white girl disappears from a white prep school in a white suburb. Nobody knows what happened to her. The overall whiteness of the world is threatened. This must be resolved by whatever means possible.
Heidi Julavits
#77. It is always rather dismal work walking over the great snow plain when sky and surface merge in one pall of dead whiteness, but it is cheering to be in such good company with everything going on steadily and well.
Robert Falcon Scott
#78. The moon. There's no other moon like one on a clear New Mexico night. It rises over the Sandias and soothes the miles and miles of barren desert with all the quiet whiteness of a first snow.
Lucia Berlin
#79. When he actually comes, he brings her a book containing white paper, as if it were a sign of her salvation, and she reads a dedication
something about people who have lost hope but start to swim in the whiteness of these leaves and perhaps find a new beginning with their first pen stroke.
Unica Zurn
#80. In a snowfall that covers the winter grass a white heron uses his own whiteness to disappear.
Dogen
#81. It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me.
Herman Melville
#82. Art, like Nebraska, is a journey into thin air, a walk into whiteness, where you lose everything but yourself.
Joan Acocella
#83. The global surface albedo [surface whiteness] and greenhouse gas changes account for practically the entire global climate change.
James Hansen
#84. The history of representations of Cleopatra provides one of the clearest instances of the conviction that whiteness is the pinnacle of human beauty. Cleopatra became a byword for feminine beauty in European culture, but in the process she had to be represented as white. As
Richard Dyer
#85. The discovery of personal whiteness among the world's peoples is a very modern thing - a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed. The ancient world would have laughed at such a distinction.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#86. You speak as if God was white and Southern! As if we somehow owned his image. You speak like a fool. The Negro is not some other kind of creature than we are. Whiteness is not sacred. It can't on defining everything.
Sue Monk Kidd
#88. We live in a world in which it's harder to talk about the American in the singular, so we're a multi. We have several different people who represent the United States, so in that sense whiteness, the salience, the importance of whiteness is kind of tamping down some.
Nell Irvin Painter
#89. The very definition of 'blackness' is as broad as that of 'whiteness,' yet we're seemingly always trying to find a specific, limited definition.
Issa Rae
#90. Our holiness is an effect, not a cause; so long as our eyes are on our own personal whiteness as an end in itself, the thing breaks down.
Charles Simeon
#91. He dropped the tavern apron in a heap on the floor and pulled the freshly laundered one up and over his head, tied it with slightly tremoring fingers. The vast whiteness felt like absolution.
Devon Trevarrow Flaherty
#92. Julie wanted to die of his own whiteness, to be drowned in the tide of his embarrassment on behalf of all uncool white people everywhere when they tried to be cool.
Michael Chabon
#93. No one tells every white person in this country how to be. No one tells every Hispanic, or Asian or Jewish person in this country how to be. There is no single definition of whiteness or single definition of blackness.
Montel Williams
#94. But there is always a November space after the leaves have fallen when she felt it was almost indecent to intrude on the woods ... for their glory terrestrial had departed and their glory celestial of spirit and purity and whiteness had not yet come upon them.
L.M. Montgomery
#95. Whiteness, Fanon asserts, has become a symbol of purity, of Justice, Truth, Virginity. It defi nes what it means to be civilized, modern and human
Anonymous
#96. Huh. I'm not sure how to respond to this. Is Alex Trebek black? He sure doesn't look black. He looks pretty white to me. He looks like the quintessence, the very incarnation, of whiteness.
A. J. Jacobs
#97. Children feel the whiteness of the lily with a graphic and passionate clearness which we cannot give them at all. The only thing we can give them is information-the information that if you break the lily in two it won't grow again.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#98. But the pinkness and whiteness of underskirts and camisoles, the frilliness of foundation garments, the rustle about the bustle and the fuss about the bust.
Gregory Maguire
#99. I am the American Dream. When I bleed, it's awfully red, and when I bruise, it's bluer than the heavens, and I promise you'll get lost somewhere in the whiteness of my smile.
J. Merridew
#100. He liked to refer to his whiteness the way all white liberals did: only acknowledging it when he felt oppressed by it, otherwise pretending it didn't exist.
Brit Bennett
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