Top 500 Colson Whitehead Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

203. “If you had the power to make people do what you wanted and never exercised it, what was the point of having it?”

— Colson Whitehead

204. “To escape the boundary of the plantation was to escape the fundamental principles of your existence: impossible.”

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

207. “Cora adored the old almanacs for containing the entire world.”

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

209. “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

210. “Tipple sold his success much more effectively than he did. How to get excited about, take pride in something that came so naturally? It was like being honored for breathing.”

— Colson Whitehead

211. “It was her grandmother talking that Sunday evening when Caesar approached Cora about the underground railroad, and she said no. Three weeks later she said yes. This time it was her mother talking.”

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

213. “The peculiar institution made Cora into a maker of lists as well. In her inventory of loss, people were not reduced to sums, but multiplied by their kindnesses.”

— Colson Whitehead

214. “At ninety, everything is air and the difference between you and the medium of your passage is disintegrating with every increment of the ascension.”

— Colson Whitehead

215. “Reassembling those fragments into confirmation of a shared darkness: If it is true for you, it is true for someone else, and you are no longer alone.”

— Colson Whitehead

216. “It was the sound of the god of death from one of the forgotten religions, the one that got it right, upstaging the pretenders with their billions of duped faithful. Every god ever manufactured by the light of cave fires to explain the thunder or calling forth the fashionable supplications in far-flung temples was the wrong one. He had come around after all this time, preening as he toured the necropolis, his kingdom risen at last.”

— Colson Whitehead

217. “But it was one thing to allow someone to kill for you and another to let him live next door.”

— Colson Whitehead

218. “Settlers needed the land, and if the Indians hadn’t learned by then that the white man’s treaties were entirely worthless, Ridgeway said, they deserved what they got.”

— Colson Whitehead

219. “Hipsters seek refuge in church, Our Lady of Perpetual Subculture. There is some discussion as to whether or not they are still cool but then they are calmed by the obscure location and the arrival of their kind. Keep the address to yourself, let the rabble fund it themselves. Wow, this crappy performance art is really making me feel no so terrible about my various emotional issues.”

— Colson Whitehead

220. “Manhattan was empty except for soldiers and legions of the damned, and already gentrification had resumed.”

— Colson Whitehead

221. “I’m what the botanists call a hybrid,” he said the first time Cora heard him speak, “A mixture of two different families. In flowers, such a concoction pleases the eye. When that amalgamation takes its shape in flesh and blood, some take great offence. In this room we recognize it for what it is – a new beauty come into the world, and it is in bloom all around us.”

— Colson Whitehead

222. “Rumors have flourished in worse soil than this.”

— Colson Whitehead

223. “You have to have an inside you, she used to say, and an outside you. Ain’t nobody’s business who you are really, so it’s up to you what you gave them.”

— Colson Whitehead

224. “This city is reward for all it will enable you to achieve and punishment for all the crimes it will force you to commit.”

— Colson Whitehead

225. “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

226. “Perhaps if he’d spent more time in the crucible of the county jail, Elwood would have known that it is best not to interfere in other people’s violence, no matter the underlying facts of the incident.”

— Colson Whitehead

227. “The whites got what they deserved. For enslaving her people, for massacring another race, for stealing the very land itself. Let them burn by flame or fever, let the destruction started here rove acre by acre until the dead have been avenged.”

— Colson Whitehead

228. “Perhaps his life might have veered elsewhere if the US government had opened the country to colored advancement like they opened the army. But it was one thing to allow someone to kill for you and another to let him live next door. The GI Bill fixed things pretty good for the white boys he served with, but the uniform meant different things depending who wore it. What was the point of a no-interest loan when a white bank won’t let you step inside?”

— Colson Whitehead

229. “I was nostalgic for everything big and small. Nostalgic for what never happened and nostalgic about what will be, looking forward to looking back on a time when things got easier.”

— Colson Whitehead

230. “Truth was a changing display in a shop window, manipulated by hands when you weren’t looking, alluring and ever out of reach. The whites came to this land for a fresh start and to escape the tyranny of their masters, just as the freemen had fled theirs. But the ideals they held up for themselves, they denied others.”

— Colson Whitehead

231. “Roger Tipple did not have a weak chin so much as a very aggressive neck.”

— Colson Whitehead

232. “They were exiles, but Hob provided a type of protection once they settled in. By playing up their strangeness, the way a slave simpered and acted childlike to escape a beating, they evaded the entanglements of the quarter. The walls of Hob made a fortress some nights, rescuing them from the feuds and conspiracies. White men eat you up, but sometimes colored folk eat you up, too. She.”

— Colson Whitehead

233. “The wildcat strike of ’68: an introduction to the city so wretched that he had to interpret it as a hazing.”

— Colson Whitehead

234. “This or this,” his eye doctor asked at checkups, a choice between two lenses of different power. Elwood never ceased to marvel how you could walk around and get used to seeing only a fraction of the world. Not knowing you only saw a sliver of the real thing. This or this?”

— Colson Whitehead

235. “It was crazy to run and crazy not to run. How could a boy look past the school’s property line, see that free and living world beyond, and not contemplate a dash to freedom? To write one’s own story for once. To forbid the thought of escape, even that slightest butterfly thought of escape, was to murder one’s humanity.”

— Colson Whitehead

236. “By making a circle of themselves that separated the human spirits within from the degradation without. Noble.”

— Colson Whitehead

237. “Even in death the boys were trouble.”

— Colson Whitehead

238. “ARNOLD Ridgeway’s father was a blacksmith. The sunset glow of molten iron bewitched him, the way the color emerged in the stock slow and then fast, overtaking it like an emotion, the sudden pliability and restless writhing of the thing as it waited for purpose. His forge was a window into the primitive energies of the world.”

— Colson Whitehead

239. “The Great War had always been between the white and the black. It always would be.”

— Colson Whitehead

240. “Know your value and you know your place in the order. To escape the boundary of the plantation was to escape the fundamental principles of your existence: impossible.”

— Colson Whitehead

241. “Black people always found a way in the most miserable circumstances. If we didn’t, we’d have been exterminated by the white man long ago.”

— Colson Whitehead

242. “Try to forget bit by bit, it will be easier on you. Leave it behind. Then the plane tilts in its escape and over the gray wing the city explodes into view with all its miles and spires and inscrutable hustle and as you try to comprehend this sight you realize that you were never really there at all.”

— Colson Whitehead

243. “Social media wasn’t usually my thing, as it had the word “social” in it, but I’d taken to the platform after a personal tragedy. I had a cat, the cat died, and now what I used to say to my cat all day, I tweeted. It helped that 140 characters was roughly my preferred limit when it came to human interaction.”

— Colson Whitehead

244. “Where their pink necks emerged from the linen, that’s where you strike, the vulnerable inch.”

— Colson Whitehead

245. “If you believed in the holy circulation of envelopes, everything that went down happened because a man took an envelope and didn’t do his job. An envelope is an envelope. Disrespect the order and the whole system breaks down.”

— Colson Whitehead

246. “The whip was the standard punishment for disobedience. Running away was a transgression so large that the punishment enveloped every generous soul on her brief tour of freedom.”

— Colson Whitehead

247. “In America the quirk was that people were things.”

— Colson Whitehead

248. “Each thing had a value and as the value changed, everything else changed also. A broken calabash was worth less than one that held its water, a hook that kept its catfish more prized than one that relinquished its bait. In America the quirk was that people were things.”

— Colson Whitehead

249. “What had started it, the mess this week? A white cop shot an unarmed black boy three times and killed him. Good old American know-how on display: We do marvels, we do injustice, and our hands were always busy.”

— Colson Whitehead

250. “If you want to see what this nation is all about, you have to ride the rails. Look outside as you speed through, and you’ll find the true face of America.”

— Colson Whitehead