Top 500 Colson Whitehead Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “We go solo, my kinfolk and I, taking each day as an IKEA bookcase we build alone, sans instructions. The leftover pieces? We gobble them down, and sometimes it’s the only thing we eat all day.”

— Colson Whitehead

452. “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

453. “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

454. “He heard the sound of teeth splintering.”

— Colson Whitehead

455. “Is this the truth of our historic encounter?”

— Colson Whitehead

456. “I contain multitudes, most of them flawed.”

— Colson Whitehead

457. “To build a House of Jerky is to triumph against the odds, to construct a nitrate-filled monument to possibility and individual perseverance. Dexter Choi was an outlaw. He faced down fate and flopped a full house.”

— Colson Whitehead

458. “Humiliation was his currency, but tonight Miss Laura had picked his pocket.”

— Colson Whitehead

459. “A force from above held him down, and a counterforce from below bore him aloft. He hovered on unexceptionality.”

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

461. “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

462. “Sometimes a slave will be lost in a brief eddy of liberation.”

— Colson Whitehead

463. “The white men who wrote it didn’t understand it either, if all men did not truly mean all men.”

— Colson Whitehead

464. “He was aware of his body as a shell. Fragile, thin as excuses. A vessel containing the dust of his essential him-ness which would be lost when the vessel failed. Well, that was the way of the world. For a time he was fixed in his body, stuck and named and fixed in place, but one day that would not be the case. One day only his name would remain, on a tombstone or etched onto an urn, marking his dried bones or ashes.”

— Colson Whitehead

465. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

468. “In his life, Donald wrapped himself in a kind of quiet that, depending on the observer, signaled imbecility or a reservoir of mystery.”

— Colson Whitehead

469. “Step back and the world is a classroom if need be.”

— Colson Whitehead

470. “He admired liars who kept on lying even though their lies were obvious, but there was nothing anyone could do about it. Another proof of one’s powerlessness before other people.”

— Colson Whitehead

471. “The world continued to instruct: Do not love for they will disappear, do not trust for you will be betrayed, do not stand up for you will be swatted down. Still he heard those higher imperatives: Love and that.”

— Colson Whitehead

472. “I seen all kinds of white people in my life, and I’ll tell you something. They all alike. Every last one of them. Act like I’m not even in the room. To hear them say such things, the things they say, right in front of my face, like I’m not even in the room. Such horrible things.”

— Colson Whitehead

473. “There had been no kidnapped boys swabbing the decks and earning pats on the head from white kidnappers.”

— Colson Whitehead

474. “America was big and blighted in gamey spots by racial intolerance and violence. Visiting relatives in Georgia? Here are the safe routes around the sundown towns and cracker territories where you might not make it out alive, the towns and counties to be avoided if you valued your life.”

— Colson Whitehead

475. “Crooks and civilians need to congregate every once in a while to reinforce their life decisions.”

— Colson Whitehead

476. “The patroller required no reason to stop a person apart from color.”

— Colson Whitehead

477. “Chester Miller was in his late fifties, slim-built except for his belly, which perched on his belt like an egg. A little sleepy.”

— Colson Whitehead

478. “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

479. “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

480. “To preempt rejection she dresses to exaggerate her difference when the true enemy is not the world’s disdain but its indifference. He is surely the next item in a dreary procession and cannot be seen for all those previous disappointments.”

— Colson Whitehead

481. “He felt unreal those days of the riots when his streets were made strange by violence. Despite what America saw on the news, only a fraction of the community had picked up bricks and bats and kerosene. The devastation had been nothing compared to what lay before him now, but if you bottled the rage and hope and fury of all the people of Harlem and made it into a bomb, the results would look something like this.”

— Colson Whitehead

482. “That was a temporary setback,” Zippo said. “If you call an opportunity to take stock and really think about how you can make your life better a ’setback.”

— Colson Whitehead

483. “Raymond shared theirs – and the.”

— Colson Whitehead

484. “Craftsmen and artisans created items that were brittle rumors compared with his father’s iron facts.”

— Colson Whitehead

485. “Lesson: If you’re going to view blinds as taxes, be a Republican about them.”

— Colson Whitehead

486. “This elevator’s vibrations are resolving themselves in her mind as an aqua-blue cone.”

— Colson Whitehead

487. “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

488. “The only voices were those of the boys below, the shouts and the laughter and fearful cries, as if he floated in a bitter heaven.”

— Colson Whitehead

489. “That was the man’s real trouble, not the savage and uncanny civilizations he encountered – he kept forgetting what he had.”

— Colson Whitehead

490. “I can’t help it if I understand that everything tends to ruin. Over our heads, Skylab is eternally falling down, I can see it all, the debris raining without cessation. I was a skinny guy, but I was morbidly obese with doom.”

— Colson Whitehead

491. “Stickups were chops – they cook fast and hot, you’re in and out. A stakeout was ribs – fire down low, slow, taking your time.”

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

493. “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

494. “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

495. “My struggle is your struggle, your burden is my burden. But how to tell people?”

— Colson Whitehead

496. “I sleep poorly, but I nap rich.”

— Colson Whitehead

497. “Fear drove these people, even more than cotton money.”

— Colson Whitehead

498. “Antislavery literature was illegal in this part of the nation. Abolitionists and sympathizers who came down to Georgia and Florida were run off, flogged and abused by mobs, tarred and feathered. Methodists and their inanities had no place in the bosom of King Cotton. The planters did not abide contagion.”

— Colson Whitehead

499. “She flickered then, as Ruby had that morning, and he saw her as she was on that rainy afternoon under his umbrella: almond-shaped dark eyes under long lashes, delicate in her pink cardigan, edges of her mouth upturned at one of her strange jokes. Unaware of the effect she had on people. On him, all these years later.”

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead