Top 500 Colson Whitehead Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Pick your fights like you pick your nose: with complete awareness of where you are.”

— Colson Whitehead

152. “He is fat and pink. On the United Elevator Co. advertisements, they airbrush away the pocks in his cheeks, the red slivers in his nose. In person he is too flesh, a handful of raw meat. Dogs have been known to follow him, optimistic.”

— Colson Whitehead

153. “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

154. “He had met this sort of white man before, earnest and believing what came out of their mouths. The veracity of their words was another matter, but at least they believed them. The southern white man was spat from the loins of the devil and there was no way to forecast his next evil act.”

— Colson Whitehead

155. “I feel about my phone the way horror-movie ventriloquists feel about their dummies: It’s smarter than me, better than me, and I will kill anyone who comes between us.”

— Colson Whitehead

156. “He stopped hooking up with other people once he realized the first thing he did was calculate whether or not he could outrun them.”

— Colson Whitehead

157. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

159. “Johnny Dandy starring Blake Headley and Patricia De Hammond had been running on Broadway at the Divinity Theater since Memorial Day weekend. Critics had meted their blows and yet. The dialogue and action were so shrouded in euphemism, so opaque in meaning and intention, alternately dull and.”

— Colson Whitehead

160. “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

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

165. “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

166. “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

167. “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

168. “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

169. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

171. “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

172. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

174. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

176. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

178. “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

179. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

181. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

183. “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

184. “Now he worked on a new theory: There was no higher system guiding Nickel’s brutality, merely an indiscriminate spite, one that had nothing to do with people. A figment from tenth-grade science struck him: a Perpetual Misery Machine, one that operated by itself without human agency. Also, Archimedes, one of his first encyclopedia finds. Violence is the only lever big enough to move the world.”

— Colson Whitehead

185. “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

186. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

188. “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

189. “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

190. “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

191. “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

192. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

194. “Take it out on each other if you cannot take it out on the ones who deserve it.”

— Colson Whitehead

195. “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

196. “Watch and think and plan. Let the world be a mob – Elwood will walk through it. They might curse and spit and strike him, but he’d make it through to the other side. Bloodied and tired, but he’d make it through.”

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

198. “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

199. “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

200. “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