Top 500 Colson Whitehead Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “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

452. “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

453. “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

454. “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

455. “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

456. “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

457. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

459. “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

460. “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

461. “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

462. “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

463. “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

464. “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

465. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

467. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

473. “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

474. “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

475. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

478. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

480. “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

481. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

484. “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

485. “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

486. “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

487. “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

488. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

491. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

494. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

497. “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

498. “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

499. “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

500. “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