Top 500 Colson Whitehead Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “There had been no kidnapped boys swabbing the decks and earning pats on the head from white kidnappers.”

— Colson Whitehead

452. “Saturdays in Sag Harbor, I liked to lie in bed listening to the weekend rev itself up.”

— Colson Whitehead

453. “Hope is a gateway drug, don’t do it.”

— Colson Whitehead

454. “Time enough for Cora to take stock of her journey from Randall and make a thick braid of her misfortunes.”

— Colson Whitehead

455. “Her mind was wily though, twisty. Thoughts she did not like wormed in from the sides, from beneath, through the cracks, from places she had battened down.”

— Colson Whitehead

456. “As if something moved toward them, old and dark.”

— Colson Whitehead

457. “She has one pair of worn sneakers, left over from when she first moved to the city and spent long hours on trudging marches between the buildings. Each time she came to the city’s edges and saw the churning brown rivers beyond, Lila Mae would hit a right angle and turn back into the buildings, deeper in. She’d never experienced anonymity like that: it’s as if the place stimulates enzymes that form a carapace.”

— Colson Whitehead

458. “Slavery as a moral issue never interested Ethel. If God had not meant for Africans to be enslaved, they wouldn’t be in chains. She did, however, have firm ideas about not getting killed for other people’s high-minded ideas.”

— Colson Whitehead

459. “It’s not so different up there, Lila Mae. They have the same white people up there they got down here. It might look different. It might feel different. But it’s the same.”

— Colson Whitehead

460. “It was the last time he raised his hand. The way he saw it, living taught you that you didn’t have to live the way you’d been taught to live. You came from one place but more important was where you decided to go.”

— Colson Whitehead

461. “Sarsaparilla boiled for one of Sybil’s tonics, overpowering the aroma of the roasting meat. Cora.”

— Colson Whitehead

462. “South Carolina has a much more enlightened attitude toward colored advancement than the rest of the south.”

— Colson Whitehead

463. “White men squabbled before judges over claims to this or that tract hundreds of miles away that had been carved up on a map. Slaves fought with equal fervor over their tiny parcels at their feet.”

— Colson Whitehead

464. “The boys knew to hide their enthusiasm over little kid things that still had an allure.”

— Colson Whitehead

465. “When she got older, she described herself as a student of American history, attuned to the inevitable. She said that white towns had simply banded together to rid themselves of the black stronghold in their midst. That is how the European tribes operate, she said. If they can’t control it, they destroy it.”

— Colson Whitehead

466. “Some kids rebelled to get attention. I did stupid things very carefully, spending all of my time thinking of ways to engineer small stupid things without getting caught. Things so small that no one else could see them and only I knew about them. But there I was last night, being stupid in a group, and of course that broke my rules and look where it got me.”

— Colson Whitehead

467. “She pushed the plantation from her again. She was getting better at it. Her mind was wily though, twisty. Thoughts she did not like wormed in from the sides, from beneath, through the cracks, from places she had battened down.”

— Colson Whitehead

468. “Entrepreneur?” Pepper said the last part like manure. “That’s just a hustler who pays taxes.”

— Colson Whitehead

469. “She’d have to get started if she was going to read them all.”

— Colson Whitehead

470. “I didn’t have illusions about being one of the November Nine. We live in an age in which sitcoms outnumber miracles, and perhaps that is what we deserve.”

— Colson Whitehead

471. “Twenty years is a while. They were both older, fatter, and sadder – “which is the general trajectory” – and that was a nice couple of days.”

— Colson Whitehead

472. “The man with the handlebar mustache had a scar that dug from his lip to the middle of his cheek, as if he’d wriggled free from a fisherman’s hook.”

— Colson Whitehead

473. “The plague touched them all, blood contact or no. The secret murderers, dormant rapists, and latent fascists were now free to express their ruthless natures. The congenitally timid, those who had been stingy with their dreams for themselves, those who came out of the womb scared and remained so: These, too, found a final stage for their weakness and in their last breaths were fulfilled. I’ve always been like this. Now I’m more me.”

— Colson Whitehead

474. “As before, home was a beloved barricade. When school, work, the many-headed beast of strangers and villains comprising the world threatened to destroy, home remained, family remained, and the locks would hold, the lullabies would ward off all bogeymen. He was trapped in this house and he couldn’t think of where else he’d rather be.”

— Colson Whitehead

475. “One of the radio stations sometimes played the theme to the Andy Griffith Show... The song was a tiny, quiet piece of America carved out of the rest. No fire hoses, no need for the National Guard.”

— Colson Whitehead

476. “Why not remove his desk, bring in a treadmill, hang a carrot from the ceiling and stop all pretense already.”

— Colson Whitehead

477. “Patriots boasted of how often they’d been searched and given a clean bill.”

— Colson Whitehead

478. “She didn’t agree with the popular arguments for slavery but saw it as a necessary evil given the obvious intellectual deficiencies of the African tribe. To free them from bondage all at once would be disastrous – how would they manage their affairs without a careful and patient eye to guide them?”

— Colson Whitehead

479. “Hipsters seek refuge in church, Our Lady of Perpetual Subculture.”

— Colson Whitehead

480. “Who knew what brand of mutiny his captives might cook up if they shared a common tongue.”

— Colson Whitehead

481. “What’s wrong with Disneyland? It brings joy to millions and tutors children about the corporate, overbranded world they’ve been born into.”

— Colson Whitehead

482. “That they ride in a box on a rope in a pit. That they are in the void.”

— Colson Whitehead

483. “May the next traveler not tarry and keep moving up the line, all the way to liberty.”

— Colson Whitehead

484. “The atmosphere in Nightbirds was ever five minutes after a big argument and no one telling you what happened. Everyone in their neutral corners replaying KO’s and low blows and devising too-late parries. You didn’t know what it had been about or who’d won, just that nobody wanted to talk about it, they glance around and knead grudges in their fists.”

— Colson Whitehead

485. “Bottom line: A man has a mind to place an ad and possesses the means, you run the ad. Save the censorship for the front page.”

— Colson Whitehead

486. “His disdain for those he robbed was of a different variety, akin to that of a child grinding his shoe on a cockroach.”

— Colson Whitehead

487. “You never see a fat ventriloquist. Pepper was of the mind that this reflected the parasitic nature of the relationship, wherein the puppet leeches the life essence of the puppeteer. Which gave him an idea for a diet craze: the mass adoption of puppet sidekicks. Send the price of lumber through the roof. From time to time his mind turned to business ventures.”

— Colson Whitehead

488. “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

489. “Cora blamed the people who wrote it down. People always got things wrong, on purpose as much as by accident.”

— Colson Whitehead

490. “Sleep the sleep of the successful because somehow you made it through the day without anyone finding out that you are a complete fraud.”

— Colson Whitehead

491. “The man’s posture said that he did not enjoy taking orders, and the insolence in his eyes was not slave insolence, an impotent pose, but a hard fact.”

— Colson Whitehead

492. “Cora had become too accustomed to escaping unscathed from encounters with white authority.”

— Colson Whitehead

493. “After a lull in white arrests, some towns increased the rewards for turning in collaborators. Folks informed on business rivals, ancient nemeses, and neighbors, recounting old conversations where the traitors had uttered forbidden sympathies. Children tattled on their parents, taught by schoolmistresses the hallmarks of sedition.”

— Colson Whitehead

494. “When they were done hauling, the boys had performed surgery – cut the rotten tissue from the house and plopped it on the tray of the curb.”

— Colson Whitehead

495. “Some days Carney felt the need to press his cousin on a lie until it broke and some days his love was such that the slightest quiver of mistrust made him ashamed.”

— Colson Whitehead

496. “She had never seen him rush or hurry. The man moved with exquisite calm, like a leaf drifting on the surface of a pond, making its own way on gentle currents.”

— Colson Whitehead

497. “She is mistress to her personality and well accustomed to reminding her more atavistic inclinations that the world is the world and the odd punch or eye-gouge will not make it any other way.”

— Colson Whitehead

498. “Like the moon, you’re only good and visible a few days a month. Exerting influence, pulling up whitecaps. The rest of time falling away, cut up into parts and nobody knows where you are.”

— Colson Whitehead

499. “Hard work was the fundamental thing. For hard work did not allow time for marches.”

— Colson Whitehead

500. “This slow debate about the rain: it’s not about rain at all, but the fragility of what we know. We’re all just guessing.”

— Colson Whitehead