Top 500 Colson Whitehead Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “The world is mean from the start and gets meaner every day. It uses you up until you only dream of death. Mabel.”

— Colson Whitehead

102. “But who can resist the seductions of elevators these days, those stepping stones to Heaven, which make relentless verticality so alluring?”

— Colson Whitehead

103. “I prefer the American spirit, the one that called us from the Old World to the New, to conquer and build and civilize. And destroy that what needs to be destroyed. To lift up the lesser races. If not lift up, subjugate. And if not subjugate, exterminate. Our destiny by divine prescription – the American imperative.”

— Colson Whitehead

104. “Freedom was a thing that shifted as you looked at it, the way a forest is dense with the trees up close but from the outside, from the empty meadow, you see its true limits. Being free had nothing to do with chains or how much space you had. On the plantation, she was not free, but she moved unrestricted on its acres, tasting the air and tracing the summer stars. The place was big in its smallness. Here, she was free of her master but slunk around a warren so tiny she couldn’t stand.”

— Colson Whitehead

105. “You are a soulless monster whose fright mask is incapable of capturing human expressions.”

— Colson Whitehead

106. “He has to trust a stranger to do the right thing. It was impossible, like loving the one who wanted to destroy you, but that was the message of the movement: to trust in the ultimate decency that lived in every human heart.”

— Colson Whitehead

107. “He ate every miserable spoonful and ever since it struck him that adults are always trying to buy off children to make them forget their bad actions.”

— Colson Whitehead

108. “Sometimes such an experience bound one person to another; just as often the shame of one’s powerlessness made all witnesses into enemies.”

— Colson Whitehead

109. “I have a good poker face because I am half dead inside.”

— Colson Whitehead

110. “Problem was, even if you avoided trouble, trouble might reach out and snatch you anyway. Another student might sniff out a weakness and start something, one of the staff dislikes your smile and knocks it off your face. You might stumble into a bramble of bad luck of the sort that got you here in the first place.”

— Colson Whitehead

111. “That’s how the European tribes operate, she said. If they can’t control it, they destroy it.”

— Colson Whitehead

112. “Poems were too close to prayer, rousing regrettable passions. Waiting for God to rescue you when it was up to you. Poetry and prayer put ideas in people’s heads that got them killed, distracting them from the ruthless mechanism of the world.”

— Colson Whitehead

113. “The championship would be their sole acquaintance with justice at Nickel.”

— Colson Whitehead

114. “No one really cares about other people when you get down to it – their own struggles are too close up.”

— Colson Whitehead

115. “When black blood was money, the savvy businessman knew to open the vein.”

— Colson Whitehead

116. “Tonight the song you always despised strides from the jukebox full-bodied and you hear the lyrics for the first time, understand the lyrics for the first time after all these years. This new you with an older soul. Now it’s your favorite. All this time singing the wrong words.”

— Colson Whitehead

117. “New York City does not hold our former selves against us. Perhaps we can extend the same courtesy.”

— Colson Whitehead

118. “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. A young buck from strong tribal stock got customers into a froth. A slave girl squeezing out pups was like a mint, money that bred money. If you were a thing – a cart or a horse or a slave – your value determined your possibilities.”

— Colson Whitehead

119. “You go on about reasons,” Cora said. “Call things by other names as if it changes what they are. But that don’t make them true.”

— Colson Whitehead

120. “The only currency to satisfy the debt was their survival and to help others when circumstances permitted.”

— Colson Whitehead

121. “Maynard Spencer was a white man in his late fifties, bits of silver in his cropped black hair. A real “crack of dawner,” as Harriet used to say, who moved with a deliberate air, as if he rehearsed everything in front of a mirror.”

— Colson Whitehead

122. “Two people, two hands, and two songs, in this case “Big Shot” and “Bette Davis Eyes.” The lyrics of the two songs provided no commentary, honest or ironic, on the proceedings. They were merely there and always underfoot, the insistent gray muck that was pop culture. It stuck to our shoes and we tracked it through our lives.”

— Colson Whitehead

123. “Racial prejudice rotted one’s faculties.”

— Colson Whitehead

124. “The Four Questions?” “As put forth by Mettleheim: How did this happen? How could this happen? Is it exceptional? How will it be avoided in the future?”

— Colson Whitehead

125. “Here’s a tip for new parents: Start lowering those expectations early, it’s going to pay off later.”

— Colson Whitehead

126. “He had nerve damage: input could not penetrate. The world stalled out at his edges. Sometimes he had trouble speaking to other people, rummaging for language, and it seemed to him that an invisible layer divided him from the rest of the world, a membrane of emotional surface tension.”

— Colson Whitehead

127. “How to get through the day if every indignity capsized you in a ditch?”

— Colson Whitehead

128. “The previous night in Tennessee, Ridgeway had called Cora and her mother a flaw in the American scheme. If two women were a flaw, what was a community? –.”

— Colson Whitehead

129. “In terms of why everything is different, each book is different than the one before because I’m so bored of what I just finished I want to work on something different. The next book becomes an antidote to what I did before.”

— Colson Whitehead

130. “He was a mediocre man. He had led a mediocre life exceptional only in the magnitude of its unexceptionality. Now the world was mediocre, rendering him perfect.”

— Colson Whitehead

131. “The word we. We are not one people but many different people. How can one person speak for this great, beautiful race – which is not one race but many, with a million desires and hopes and wished for ourselves and our children?”

— Colson Whitehead

132. “Cherish your old apartments and pause for a moment when you pass them. Pay tribute, for they are the caretakers for your reinventions.”

— Colson Whitehead

133. “What did you get for that, for knowing the day you were born into the white man’s world? It didn’t seem like the thing.”

— Colson Whitehead

134. “Somewhere, years ago, she had stepped off the path of life and could no longer find her way back to the family of people.”

— Colson Whitehead

135. “And America, too, is a delusion, the grandest one of all. The white race believes – believes with all its heart – that it is their right to take the land. To kill Indians. Make war. Enslave their brothers. This nation shouldn’t exist, if there is any justice in the world, for its foundations are murder, theft, and cruelty. Yet here we are.”

— Colson Whitehead

136. “He was a mote cycling in the wheels of a giant clock. Millions of people tended to this magnificent contraption, they lived and sweated and toiled in it, serving the mechanism of metropolis and making it bigger, better, story by glorious story and idea by unlikely idea. How small he was, tumbling between the teeth.”

— Colson Whitehead

137. “They will have to destroy this city once we deliver the black box. The current bones will not accommodate the marrow of the device. They will have to raze the city and cart off the rubble to less popular boroughs and start anew.”

— Colson Whitehead

138. “Also, Archimedes, one of his first encyclopedia finds. Violence is the only lever big enough to move the world.”

— Colson Whitehead

139. “The land she tilled and worked had been Indian land. She knew the white men bragged about the efficiency of the massacres, where they killed women and babies, and strangled their futures in the crib. Stolen babies working stolen land. It was an engine that did not stop, its hungry boiler fed with blood.”

— Colson Whitehead

140. “Plantation justice was mean and constant but the world was indiscriminate. Out in the world, the wicked escaped comeuppance and the decent stood in their stead at the whipping tree. Tennessee’s disasters were the fruit of indifferent nature, without connection to the crimes of the homesteaders. To how the Cherokee had lived their lives.”

— Colson Whitehead

141. “I write books and either people read them or they don’t read them. The rise of Facebook or e-books doesn’t change the difficulty level of writing sentences and thinking up new ideas.”

— Colson Whitehead

142. “Later he decided the specifics were not important, that the true lesson of accidents is not the how or the why, but the taken-for-granted world they exile you from.”

— Colson Whitehead

143. “Resentment was the hinge of her personality.”

— Colson Whitehead

144. “The words from across the ocean were beaten out of them over time. For simplicity, to erase their identities, to smother uprisings.”

— Colson Whitehead

145. “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, because in the end, whatever goes down, whatever you get up to, your triumphs and transgressions, nobody actually understands what it means except for you.”

— Colson Whitehead

146. “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. If.”

— Colson Whitehead

147. “How to undo slavery’s injury to the mental faculties–so many freed men continued to be enslaved by the horrors they’d endured.”

— Colson Whitehead

148. “Crossing a single street transformed the way people talked, determined the size and condition of the homes, the dimension and character of the dreams.”

— Colson Whitehead

149. “She is alone with an unattended desk light whose electricity is an expenditure waiting to be itemized and eliminated in the next budget of Lift magazine, Covering the Elevator Industry for Thirty Years.”

— Colson Whitehead

150. “It was a gorgeous and intricate delusion, Manhattan, and from crooked angles on overcast days you saw it disintegrate, were forced to consider this tenuous creature in its true nature.”

— Colson Whitehead