Top 500 Colson Whitehead Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 10 of 10

451. “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

452. “The secret triumph you keep in your heart.”

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

454. “Things are happening too fast for her to convince herself that she does not need time to think, to get to the bottom of things.”

— Colson Whitehead

455. “Weary and a little desperate, but also high-hearted. He turned off the lights.”

— Colson Whitehead

456. “What else was an ongoing criminal enterprise complicated by periodic violence for, but to make your wife happy?”

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

460. “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

461. “My part is finished, my friends.” 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

462. “They can turn rabid at any second; this is the true result of gathering integration: the replacement of sure violence with deferred sure violence.”

— Colson Whitehead

463. “Understanding that something is always lost when it comes to human beings.”

— Colson Whitehead

464. “The moon grew fat and thin, there were solstices, first frosts and spring rains. All these things proceeded without the interference of men. She tried to imagine what the tide looked like, coming in and going out, nipping at the sand like a little dog, heedless of people and their machinations. Her strength returned.”

— Colson Whitehead

465. “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

466. “In this world, however, his reward was that void attending most human endeavor, with which all are well acquainted. His accomplishments, such as they were, gathered on the heap of the unsung.”

— Colson Whitehead

467. “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

468. “It was a night in late August, a night that rekindled in rattling windows and tree branch palsy that lost recollection of autumn, misplaced for the succession of bright summer distractions, trapped heat in small rooms and sweaty underarms.”

— Colson Whitehead

469. “In America the quirk was that people were things. Best to cut your losses on an old man who won’t survive a trip across the ocean.”

— Colson Whitehead

470. “I wrote two five-page short stories, two five-page epics, to audition for my college’s creative writing workshops, and was turned down both times. I was crushed, but in retrospect it was perfect training for being a writer. You can keep ‘write what you know’ – for a true apprenticeship, internalize the world’s indifference and accept rejection and failure into your very soul.”

— Colson Whitehead

471. “That’s that. I’m not saying that anything nefarious happened, only saying what happened.” He gestured for a refill. “One thing I’ve learned in my job is that life is cheap, and when things start getting expensive, it gets cheaper still.”

— Colson Whitehead

472. “Sandra knew how to handle herself, whether dealing with the kitchen staff or the impetuous attentions of customers. Dancing at the Apollo was a tutorial in the male animal, after all.”

— Colson Whitehead

473. “The world had whispered its rules to him for his whole life and he refused to listen, hearing instead a higher order.”

— Colson Whitehead

474. “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

475. “The worst sort of scoundrels took up the chase. Drunkards, incorrigibles, poor whites who didn’t even own shoes delighted in this opportunity to scourge the colored population.”

— Colson Whitehead

476. “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

477. “The vast fields burst with hundreds of thousands of white bolls, strung like stars in the sky on the clearest of clear nights.”

— Colson Whitehead

478. “The boy made a fist. He knew what he’d do if the man put his hand on his leg or tried to touch his thing. He’d vowed to sock Freddie Rich in the face many times and then stood paralyzed when the time came, but this day he felt he could actually do it. Drawing strength from the free world.”

— Colson Whitehead

479. “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

480. “Lander’s talk verged on a sermon, concerning the dilemma of finding your purpose once you’ve slipped the yoke of slavery. The manifold frustrations of liberty.”

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

482. “I lit fires because I didn’t know back then it was enough to see it in my head,” Zippo said. “I didn’t have to do it. That’s why people dig my boudoir photographs. Seeing it can be the same thing as doing it.”

— Colson Whitehead

483. “I was a skinny guy, but I was morbidly obese with doom.”

— Colson Whitehead

484. “Who are you after you finish something this magnificent – in constructing it you have also journeyed through it, to the other side.”

— Colson Whitehead

485. “Her price fluctuated. When you are sold that many times, the world is teaching you to pay attention.”

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

488. “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

489. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

493. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

496. “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

497. “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

498. “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

499. “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

500. “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