Top 500 Colson Whitehead Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “We must believe in our souls that we are somebody, that we are significant, that we are worthful, and we must walk the streets of life every day with this sense of dignity and this sense of somebody-ness.”

— Colson Whitehead

2. “It is failure that guides evolution; perfection provides no incentive for improvement, and nothing is perfect.”

— Colson Whitehead

3. “A monster is a person who has stopped pretending.”

— Colson Whitehead

4. “The world may be mean, but people don’t have to be, not if they refuse.”

— Colson Whitehead

5. “Know your value and you know your place in the order.”

— Colson Whitehead

6. “Like justice, it existed in theory.”

— Colson Whitehead

7. “Violence is the only lever big enough to move the world.”

— Colson Whitehead

8. “If it is true for you, it is true for someone else, and you are no longer alone.”

— Colson Whitehead

9. “It was not enough to survive, you have to live –.”

— Colson Whitehead

10. “What isn’t said is as important as what is said.”

— Colson Whitehead

11. “Truth was a changing display in a shop window, manipulated by hands when you weren’t looking, alluring and ever out of reach.”

— Colson Whitehead

12. “Make a career of humanity. Make it a central part of your life.”

— Colson Whitehead

13. “All men are created equal, unless we decide you are not a man.”

— Colson Whitehead

14. “It didn’t make no sense until it made the only sense.”

— Colson Whitehead

15. “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

16. “Sanctimony and self-regard are as American as smallpox blankets and supersize meals.”

— Colson Whitehead

17. “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

18. “Sometimes a workweek will grind you into sand, pulverize you into particles.”

— Colson Whitehead

19. “It had been a cool dawn. Wisps of white moisture hovered over the ground.”

— Colson Whitehead

20. “Report on the Investigation into the Deaths and Burials at the Former Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida.”

— Colson Whitehead

21. “He who gets behind in a race must forever remain behind or run faster than the man in front.”

— Colson Whitehead

22. “You can change the law but you can’t change people and how they treat each other.”

— Colson Whitehead

23. “The capacity to suffer. Elwood – all the Nickel boys – existed in the capacity. Breathed in it, ate in it, dreamed in it. That was their lives now. Otherwise they would have perished. The beatings, the rapes, the unrelenting winnowing of themselves. They endured. But to love those who would have destroyed them? To make that leap? We will meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will and we will still love you.”

— Colson Whitehead

24. “The only way to know how long you are lost in the darkness is to be saved from it.”

— Colson Whitehead

25. “You can change the law but you can’t change people and how they treat each other. Nickel was racist as hell – half the people who worked here probably dressed up like the Klan on weekends – but the way Turner saw it, wickedness went deeper than skin color. It was Spencer. It was Spencer and it was Griff and it was all the parents who let their children wind up here. It was people.”

— Colson Whitehead

26. “There are people who trick you and deliver emptiness with a smile, while others rob you of your self-respect. You need to remember who you are.”

— Colson Whitehead

27. “Perhaps his life might have veered elsewhere if the US government had opened the country to colored advancement like they opened the army. But it was one thing to allow someone to kill for you and another to let him live next door.”

— Colson Whitehead

28. “The whites came to this land for a fresh start and to escape the tyranny of their masters, just as the freemen had fled theirs. But the ideals they held up for themselves, they denied others.”

— Colson Whitehead

29. “Perhaps Nickel was the very afterlife that awaited him, with a White House down the hill and an eternity of oatmeal and an infinite brotherhood of broken boys.”

— Colson Whitehead

30. “She wasn’t surprised when his character revealed itself – if you waited long enough, it always did. Like the dawn.”

— Colson Whitehead

31. “Most people say, “Show, don’t tell,” but I stand by Show and Tell, because when writers put their work out into the world, they’re like kids bringing their broken unicorns and chewed-up teddy bears into class in the sad hope that someone else will love them as much as they do.”

— Colson Whitehead

32. “If everyone looked the other way, then everybody was in on it. If he looked the other way, he was as implicated as the rest. That’s how he saw it, how he’d always seen things.”

— Colson Whitehead

33. “Sometimes a useful delusion is better than a useless truth.”

— Colson Whitehead

34. “There was an order of misery, misery tucked inside miseries, and you were meant to keep track.”

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

36. “Stolen bodies working stolen land. It was an engine that did not stop, its hungry boiler fed with blood. With the surgeries that Dr. Stevens described, Cora thought, the whites had begun stealing futures in earnest. Cut you open and rip them out, dripping. Because that’s what you do when you take away someone’s babies – steal their future. Torture them as much as you can when they are on this earth, then take away the hope that one day their people will have it better.”

— Colson Whitehead

37. “The white boys bruised differently than the black boys and called it the Ice Cream Factory because you came out with bruises of every color. The black boys called it the White House because that was its official name and it fit and didn’t need to be embellished. The White House delivered the law and everybody obeyed.”

— Colson Whitehead

38. “To think of those Nickel nights where the only sounds were tears and insects, how you could sleep in a room crammed with sixty boys and still understand that you were the only person on earth. Everybody and nobody around at the same time. Here everybody was around and by some miracle you didn’t want to wring their neck but give them a hug.”

— Colson Whitehead

39. “Live every minute as if you are late for the last train.”

— Colson Whitehead

40. “Men start off good and then the world makes them mean. The world is mean from the start and gets meaner every day. It uses you up until you only dream of death.”

— Colson Whitehead

41. “A plantation was a plantation; one might think one’s misfortunes distinct, but the true horror lay in their universality.”

— Colson Whitehead

42. “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

43. “Love and that love will be returned, trust in the righteous path and it will lead you to deliverance, fight and things will change.”

— Colson Whitehead

44. “A society manufactures the heroes it requires.”

— Colson Whitehead

45. “But we have all been branded even if you can’t see it, inside if not without.”

— Colson Whitehead

46. “We never see other people anyway, only the monsters we make of them.”

— Colson Whitehead

47. “Throw us in jail, and we will still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and, as difficult as it is, we will still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities after midnight hours, and drag us out onto some wayside road, and beat us and leave us half-dead, and we will still love you. But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom.”

— Colson Whitehead

48. “Poetry and prayer put ideas in people’s heads that got them killed, distracting them from the ruthless mechanism of the world.”

— Colson Whitehead

49. “She wondered why there were only two kinds of weather: hardship in the morning, and tribulation at night.”

— Colson Whitehead

50. “At a certain point he learned the smarter play was to avoid the things that brought you low.”

— Colson Whitehead