Top 500 Colson Whitehead Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Pick your fights like you pick your nose: with complete awareness of where you are.”

— Colson Whitehead

152. “Keep on the path and you will not see the ruined people, so do not stray from the path.”

— Colson Whitehead

153. “One of my dinner companions invited me on a strip-club excursion. I demurred, spoiled by the erotic revues of Anhedonia, where the performers remain fully clothed but get emotionally naked, delivering monologues about their top-shelf disappointments, and times when they were almost happy. Hard to enjoy American-style strip clubs after that. Once you go bleak, you never go back.”

— Colson Whitehead

154. “It was the day after Sam’s house collapsed, though she couldn’t be sure. Best to measure time now with one of the Randall plantation’s cotton scales, her hunger and fear piling on one side while her hopes were removed from the other in increments. The only way to know how long you are lost in the darkness is to be saved from it.”

— Colson Whitehead

155. “You should have gone yourself, you ask for a Coke and they come back with orange drink. No one understands the martyrdom of the volunteers for the trip to food concession.”

— Colson Whitehead

156. “An elevator doesn’t exist without its freight. If there’s no one to get on, the elevator remains in quiescence. The elevator and the passenger need each other.”

— Colson Whitehead

157. “As if these daily humiliations and sacrifices mean something, are tallied by the ones who keep the books. Tomorrow we pick up where we left off. Sleep tight. Sleep deep. Sleep the sleep of the successful because somehow you made it through the day without anyone finding out that you are a complete fraud.”

— Colson Whitehead

158. “In the dank utility room deep in the subbasements of my personality, a little man wiped his hands on his overalls and pulled the switch: More.”

— Colson Whitehead

159. “There are instruments and human players but sometimes a fiddle or a drum make instruments of those who play them, and all are put in servitude to the song.”

— Colson Whitehead

160. “The loneliness is the worst, because this knowledge is something that cannot be shared, only suffered. Just as well. Why should anyone else have it easy. Spoken like a true New Yorker.”

— Colson Whitehead

161. “You go on about reasons,” Cora said, “call things by other names, as if it changes what they are. But that doesn’t make them true.”... “but we have all been branded, even if you can’t see it – inside, if not without.”

— Colson Whitehead

162. “Talking about New York is a way of talking about the world.”

— Colson Whitehead

163. “On barstools they ogled the bachelorettes in the club and discussed their chances, recalling near-conquests from previous visits. In the buffet lines they foraged from the heat lamps and steam trays, and impaled and then swirled wasabi around tiny ceramic saucers, tinting soy sauce.”

— Colson Whitehead

164. “Everything in the garden is dying, that’s what time of year it is. The leaves blaze and desiccate in their dying before twisting to the ground as ash.”

— Colson Whitehead

165. “Why should anyone else have it easy. Spoken like a true New Yorker.”

— Colson Whitehead

166. “I think being a writer was a crappy job when you just had typewriters. It was crappy when we just had ink and paper. And it’s sort of crappy now. It’s always just you and the page. That doesn’t change.”

— Colson Whitehead

167. “The farm’s carpenters were true artisans – they had to be to keep all those book from jumping off the shelves, so many wonders did they contain.”

— Colson Whitehead

168. “His legs remembered the correct position for squatting down with toys. He played. He fit the round male studs into the round female grooves. He got some thinking done as he hunkered down on his fallen-sleep legs.”

— Colson Whitehead

169. “It had been a humdrum couple of days, reaffirming his belief in reincarnation: everything was so boring that this could not be the first time he’d experienced it.”

— Colson Whitehead

170. “The publicity of the present day causes that no sooner is a discovery or an invention made than it is already improved upon and surpassed by competing efforts.”

— Colson Whitehead

171. “She has always considered herself an atheist, not realizing she had a religion.”

— Colson Whitehead

172. “If I have three ideas and I’m working on one more than the others, that sort of tells me that I should work on that one.”

— Colson Whitehead

173. “One day a pickaninny was happy and the next the light was gone from them; in between they had been introduced to a new reality of bondage.”

— Colson Whitehead

174. “Did you know that smiling politely burns up the same amount of calories as speaking your mind.”

— Colson Whitehead

175. “Royal joined the singing to change the subject and to remind her that there were things a body could feel good about. A community that had come together, from seeding to harvest to the bee. But the song was a work song Cora knew from the cotton rows, drawing her back to the Randall cruelties and making her heart thud. Connelly used to start the song as a signal to go back to picking after a whipping. how could such a bitter thing become a means of pleasure?”

— Colson Whitehead

176. “In her Georgia misery she had pictured freedom, and it had not looked like this. Freedom was a community laboring for something lovely and rare. Mingo.”

— Colson Whitehead

177. “You have to stand up real close to the posters to see the swirls, and even then they’re easy to miss: Lila Mae had to have Jimmy point them out to her. Horns, boiling cysts, the occasional cussword inked in across Chancre’s slat teeth – they add up after a while, somehow more personal and meaningful than the usual cartoons and pinups of office homesteading.”

— Colson Whitehead

178. “All he felt now was envy. These people had expectations. Of the world, of the future, it didn’t matter – expectation was such an innovative concept to him that he couldn’t help but be a bit moved by what they were saying. Whatever that was.”

— Colson Whitehead

179. “I like movies. I’ve written screenplays as a sort of procrastination thing for me. Like I’ll work for a couple months on this idea that’s been kicking around and then like 30 pages in I’ll just go try a novel because it’s a lot easier. That’s what I know. So why am I killing myself?”

— Colson Whitehead

180. “When the work was done, and the day’s punishments, the night waited as an arena for their true loneliness and despair.”

— Colson Whitehead

181. “At intersections and crowded areas between sedans and trucks the gutter reflected the bitter pastels of metropolitan neon, rainbows hacked down to earth and dirt.”

— Colson Whitehead

182. “Do not doubt you inspire with every breath, that every breath is a marvel of engineering.”

— Colson Whitehead

183. “The first time Caesar approached Cora about running north, she said no.”

— Colson Whitehead

184. “Our government disdains a risk-reward game that millions of Americans play,” Matt wrote, “then bails out Wall Street sharks who bet unfathomable sums. I can only conclude that this contradictory stance has little to do with the skills required for each pursuit. No, for some reason, lawmakers just don’t like poker.”

— Colson Whitehead

185. “Early on my career, I figured out that I just have to write the book I have to write at that moment. Whatever else is going on in the culture is just not that important. If you could get the culture to write your book, that would be great. But the culture can’t write your book.”

— Colson Whitehead

186. “She watches the people through the sooted panes. They walk slower than they do when she reports to work and when she leaves work, and differently still from weekend strolling. They are the tin men and rag dolls who wake after hours in the toy store.”

— Colson Whitehead

187. “Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.”

— Colson Whitehead

188. “Not because any attack on his brother was an attack on himself, like they said in church, but because for him to do nothing was to undermine his own dignity.”

— Colson Whitehead

189. “In other words, fiction is payback for those who have wronged you.”

— Colson Whitehead

190. “A slow hour passed, distracted by intermittent drops of moisture from above, as if the sky were conducting a feasibility study on the implications of rain. Of committing to a course of action.”

— Colson Whitehead

191. “Google “brooklyn writer” and you’ll get, Did you mean: the future of literature as we know it?”

— Colson Whitehead

192. “People spare a minute or two relishing other people’s setbacks before their own inadequacies distract them again. This is his umpteenth pint but he has a hollow leg or some sort of emptiness in himself and doesn’t feel the least bit tipsy. What they take for her air of mystery is merely a side effect of her medication.”

— Colson Whitehead

193. “Failing at everything except his fear of success. Passed over yet again. Archivist of slights. Everyone else’s good fortune is food out of your mouth or a hug you never got from someone who should have loved you better. Halfway through lunch she realized glass ceilings allow glimpses up into another person’s hell.”

— Colson Whitehead

194. “The tiny details were a wonder: how the young men’s ties remained straight black arrows in the whirl of violence, how the curves of the young women’s perfect hairdos floated against the squares of their protest signs.”

— Colson Whitehead

195. “Plenty of boys had talked of the secret graveyard before, but as it had ever been with Nickel, no one believed them until someone else said it.”

— Colson Whitehead

196. “But now that I been out and I been brought back, I nkow there’s nothing in here that changes people. In here and out there are the same, but in here no one has to act fake anymore.”

— Colson Whitehead

197. “When the slaves finished, they had stripped the fields of their color. It was a magnificent operation, from seed to bale, but no one of them could be prideful of their labor. It had been stolen from them. Bled from them.”

— Colson Whitehead

198. “Two white men in two days had their hands around her. Was this a condition of her freedom? Caesar.”

— Colson Whitehead

199. “If you were a thing – a cart or a horse or a slave – your value determined your possibilities.”

— Colson Whitehead

200. “Life! What Inscrutable Card Shall Ye Throw Next Upon the Soft Felt of Our Days?”

— Colson Whitehead