Top 500 Colson Whitehead Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “Even in death the boys were trouble.”

— Colson Whitehead

252. “All I truly know is that we rise and fall as one, one colored family living next door to one white family. We may not know the way through the forest, but we can pick each other up when we fall, and we will arrive together.”

— Colson Whitehead

253. “Blake’s face distorted in surprise and worry, that of a man stumbling into a kingdom of hornets.”

— Colson Whitehead

254. “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

255. “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

256. “Now that she had run away and seen a bit of the country, Cora wasn’t sure the document described anything real at all. America was a ghost in the darkness, like her.”

— Colson Whitehead

257. “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

258. “On the bed of damp earth, her breathing slowed and that which separated herself from the swamp disappeared. She was free. This moment. She had to go back.”

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

260. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

262. “David Bowie is in every book, and I always put on Purple Rain and Daydream Nation when I write the final pages; so thanks to him and Prince and Sonic Youth.”

— Colson Whitehead

263. “Stolen bodies working stolen land. It was an engine that did not stop, its hungry boiler fed with blood. With the surgeries that Dr. Stevens described, Cora.”

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

265. “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

266. “We may not know the way through the forest, but we can pick each other up when we fall, and we will arrive together.” –.”

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

268. “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

269. “I would represent my country, the Republic of Anhedonia. We have no borders, but the population teems. No one has deigned to write down our history, but we are an ancient land, founded during the original disappointments, when the first person met another person.”

— Colson Whitehead

270. “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

271. “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

272. “It will enrich your spirit as nothing else can. it will give you that rare sense of nobility that can only spring from love and selflessly helping your fellow man. Make a career of humanity. Make it a central part of your life.”

— Colson Whitehead

273. “Federal Writers’ Project, which collected the life stories of former slaves in the 1930s.”

— Colson Whitehead

274. “But we have all been branded even if you can’t see it, inside if not without – and the wound from Randall’s cane was the very same thing, marking her as his.”

— Colson Whitehead

275. “The way poor Michael reciting the Declaration of Independence was an echo of something that existed elsewhere. Now that she had run away and seen a bit of the country, Cora wasn’t sure the document described anything real at all. America was a ghost in the darkness, like her.”

— Colson Whitehead

276. “Crooked world, straight world, same rules – everybody had a hand out for the envelope.”

— Colson Whitehead

277. “When they got to Oklahoma there were still more white people waiting for them, squatting on the land the Indians had been promised in the latest worthless treaty. Slow learners, the bunch.”

— Colson Whitehead

278. “Color must suffice. It has brought us to this night, this discussion, and it will take us into the future. All I truly know is that we rise and fall as one, one colored family living next door to one white family. We may not know the way through the forest, but we can pick each other up when we fall, and we will arrive together.”

— Colson Whitehead

279. “Sometimes he tried to get a basketball game together, two-on-two, but after a while we just started playing three against him, and he still won, leaving us a sorry sight at the side of the court, bent over and dizzy, palms on our knees and reaching for imaginary asthma inhalers. Imaginary asthma inhalers created a placebo effect, which was better than nothing.”

— Colson Whitehead

280. “The idea was like a hunk of wood, Caesar thought, requiring human craft and ingenuity to reveal the new shape within.”

— Colson Whitehead

281. “It was where we mingled with who we had been and who we would be. Sharing space with our echoes out in the sun.”

— Colson Whitehead

282. “In here and out there are the same, but in here no one has to act fake anymore.”

— Colson Whitehead

283. “But nobody wanted to speak on the true disposition of the world. And no one wanted to hear it.”

— Colson Whitehead

284. “Some kids rebelled to get attention. I did stupid things very carefully, spending all of my time thinking of ways to engineer small stupid things without getting caught. Things so small that no one else could see them and only I knew about them. But there I was last night, being stupid in a group, and of course that broke my rules and look where it got me.”

— Colson Whitehead

285. “The conflict in Europe was terrible and violent, she told her sailor, but she took exception to the name. The Great War had always been between the white and the black. It always would be. Cora.”

— Colson Whitehead

286. “Liberty make a body fertile,” Georgina said. That, and the knowledge they will not be sold, Cora added.”

— Colson Whitehead

287. “Cora thought he had a mean face, like a burl sprouting from a squat, sweaty trunk.”

— Colson Whitehead

288. “Over time, Elwood saw that he was always simultaneously at home in whatever scene he found himself and also seemed like he shouldn’t have been there; inside and above at the same time; a part and apart. Like a tree trunk that falls across a creek – it doesn’t belong and then it’s never not been there, generating its own ripples in the larger current.”

— Colson Whitehead

289. “The red tears of tracers shrieked through the thoroughfares and stray bullets cratered the faces of banks, churches, condos, and franchises, every place of worship a city has to offer.”

— Colson Whitehead

290. “She was a survivor but the world took her in bites.”

— Colson Whitehead

291. “On visiting day, he told her he was okay but sad, it was difficult but he was hanging in there, when all he wanted to say was, Look at what they did to me, look at what they did to me.”

— Colson Whitehead

292. “The officer of the court was a good old boy with a meaty backwoods beard and a hungover wobble to his step. He’d outgrown his shirt and the pressure against the buttons made him look upholstered.”

— Colson Whitehead

293. “Hope is a gateway drug, don’t do it.”

— Colson Whitehead

294. “And if you could make a study of the dead, Stevens thought from time to time, you could make a study of the living, and make them testify as no cadaver could.”

— Colson Whitehead

295. “The ruthless engine of cotton required its fuel of African bodies. Crisscrossing the ocean, ships brought bodies to work the land and to breed more bodies. The.”

— Colson Whitehead

296. “You need to be strong to survive the labor and to make us greater. We fatten hogs, not because it pleases us but because we need hogs to survive. But we can’t have you too clever. We can’t have you so fit you outrun us.” She.”

— Colson Whitehead

297. “It was easy to root for the winners. No, he liked the punch-drunk ones, half walking at mile twenty-three, tongues flapping like Labradors. Tumbling across the finish line by hook or by crook, feet pounded to bloody meat in their Nikes. The laggards and limpers who weren’t running the course but running deep into their character – down into the cave to return to the light with what they found.”

— Colson Whitehead

298. “The white people do not see colored people, even in broad daylight, in the middle of town.”

— Colson Whitehead

299. “Maybe everything the slave catcher said was true, Cora thought, every justification, and the sons of Ham were cursed and the slave master performed the Lord’s will. And maybe he was just a man talking to an outhouse door, waiting for someone to wipe her ass. –.”

— Colson Whitehead

300. “She thought of the picking, how it raced down the furrows at harvest, the African bodies working as one, as fast as their strength permitted. The vast fields burst with hundreds of thousands of white bolls, strung like stars in the sky on the clearest of clear nights. When the slaves finished, they had stripped the fields of their color. It was a magnificent operation, from seed to bale, but not one of them could be prideful of their labor. It had been stolen from them. Bled from them.”

— Colson Whitehead