Top 500 Colson Whitehead Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “Let one colored in and you’re integrated. Let two in, you got a race war as they try to kiss up to whitey.”

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

453. “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

454. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

456. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

461. “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

462. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

464. “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

465. “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

466. “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

467. “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

468. “Carney’s father had torched a building or two in his day. It paid the rent.”

— Colson Whitehead

469. “Where the goblin world and its assaults were banished and there was nothing but possibility.”

— Colson Whitehead

470. “It wasn’t until they were moving again that Cora realized she forgot to ask where they were headed.”

— Colson Whitehead

471. “When he heard autumn leaves skuttling in the wind, he remembered that chuckle.”

— Colson Whitehead

472. “Their daddies taught them how to keep a slave in line, passed down this brutal heirloom. Take him away from his family, whip him until all he remembers is the whip, chain him up so all he knows is chains. A term in an iron sweatbox, cooking his brains in the sun, had a way of bringing a buck around, and so did a dark cell, a room aloft in darkness, outside time.”

— Colson Whitehead

473. “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

474. “We can’t save everyone. But that doesn’t mean we can’t try. Sometimes a useful delusion is better than a useless truth. Nothing’s going to grow in this mean cold, but we can still have flowers.”

— 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. “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

477. “As it turned out, one aspect of my personality would help me in my odyssey: I was a bider. Temperamentally suited to hold out for good cards, well accustomed to waiting. We Anhedonians have adapted to long periods between good news. Our national animal is the hope camel. We have no national bird. All the birds are dead.”

— Colson Whitehead

478. “All these years out of that school and he still spent a segment of his days trying to decipher the customs of normal people. The ones who had been raised happily, three meals a day and a kiss goodnight, the ones who had no notion of White Houses, Lovers’ Lanes, and white county judges who sentenced you to hell.”

— Colson Whitehead

479. “Who knew the havoc and ruin they’d perpetrate if allowed to run free among decent people. Best to keep them all in here, on this island, bought for twenty-seven bucks from the Indians, the story went. Twenty-seven bucks went a lot further in those days.”

— Colson Whitehead

480. “Launderer, heal thyself.”

— Colson Whitehead

481. “Georgina hailed from Delaware and had that vexing way of Delaware ladies, delighting in puzzles.”

— Colson Whitehead

482. “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

483. “At first, it didn’t sound like Carney. But then, Big Mike had tended his crop of grudges like a farmer, inspecting the rows, taking care they got enough water and fertilizer so that they grew big and healthy.”

— Colson Whitehead

484. “Aronowitz twirled in his chair and scurried into the workshop in the back, to more grunts. He reminded Carney of a squirrel in the park, darting helter-skelter after lost nuts. Maybe the other squirrels of Radio Row understood this behavior, but it was animal madness to this civilian.”

— Colson Whitehead

485. “Duty might protect him, as it had protected her.”

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

488. “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

489. “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

490. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

492. “Taken individually, the link was not much. But in concert with its fellows, a mighty iron that subjugated millions despite its weakness.”

— Colson Whitehead

493. “The reunions were terrific and rote, early tutelage in the recursive nature of human experience.”

— Colson Whitehead

494. “I thought, This is where the day curdles.”

— Colson Whitehead

495. “The light at this hour, on this street, is the secondhand gray of ghetto twilight, a dull mercury color.”

— Colson Whitehead

496. “Hard weeks, the kind where you realize you’ve engineered it so that nobody has anything on you, and that means nobody has anything for you: help, a kind word.”

— Colson Whitehead

497. “I’m middle class now”, he joked to himself. Even the roaches were of a noble sort, scurrying when he turned on the bathroom light instead of ignoring his presence. He took their modesty as a touch of class.”

— Colson Whitehead

498. “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

499. “Someone helps you out by accident, it’s still help.”

— Colson Whitehead

500. “He spills his guts, it was the last sip that sent him over the edge but she has her hands full with her own loneliness, she’s not about to take on his. Reach inside to muzzle the broken part of you that is now talking.”

— Colson Whitehead