Top 500 Colson Whitehead Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “If that happened to the harmless places, what do you think the haunted places looked like?”

— Colson Whitehead

252. “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

253. “The white boys didn’t get it as bad as the black boys, but they were not in Nickel because the world cared overmuch. Big Chet was their Great White Hope.”

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

256. “Most of those who know the story of the rings in the trees are dead by now. The iron is still there. Rusty. Deep in the heartwood. Testifying to anyone who cares to listen.”

— Colson Whitehead

257. “In Cora’s shock, the world drained to gray impressions. The first color to return was the simmering brown-red of the soil in her family’s plot.”

— Colson Whitehead

258. “She took her hatchet. She took flint and tinder. And like her mother she dug up her yams.”

— Colson Whitehead

259. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

261. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

264. “Rumsey closed with an appeal for nurturing the artistic temperament in young and old alike, “to stoke that Apollonian ember in all mortal beings.”

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

266. “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

267. “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

268. “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

269. “What a world it is, Cora thought, that makes a living prison into your only haven. Was she out of bondage or in its web: how to describe the status of a runaway?”

— Colson Whitehead

270. “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

271. “How to get through the day if every indignity capsized you in a ditch? One learned to focus one’s attention.”

— Colson Whitehead

272. “Me... squinting in discomfort at the discovery of some new defect in the design of the world.”

— Colson Whitehead

273. “To see chains on another person and be glad they are not your own – such was the good fortune permitted colored people, defined by how much worse it could be any moment. If your eyes met, both parties looked away. But this man did not. He nodded before passersby took him from.”

— Colson Whitehead

274. “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

275. “The sky was a sheet of slate but it was still warm, an August afternoon that let you know its kind was running out.”

— Colson Whitehead

276. “No slave had ever keeled over dead at a spinning wheel or been butchered for a tangle. But nobody wanted to speak on the true disposition of the world. And no one wanted to hear it.”

— Colson Whitehead

277. “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

278. “You’re supposed to pass on something useful to your children.”

— Colson Whitehead

279. “If everyone looked the other way, then everybody was in on it. If he looked the other way, he was as implicated as the rest.”

— Colson Whitehead

280. “Sometimes the fever subsided, but the plantation was always still there. Cora did not pray.”

— Colson Whitehead

281. “The second thing Elwood noticed was the boy’s eerie sense of self. The mess hall was loud with the rumble and roil of juvenile activity, but this boy bobbed in his own pocket of calm.”

— Colson Whitehead

282. “Stay on the path and you’ll be safe, eat in peace, sleep in peace, breathe in peace; stray and beware. Work together and we can subvert their evil order. It was a map of the black nation inside the white world, part of the bigger thing but its own self, independent, with its own constitution. If we didn’t help one another we’d be lost out there.”

— Colson Whitehead

283. “Cora remembered Caesar’s words about the men at the factory who were hunted by the plantation, carrying it here despite the miles. It lived in them. It still lived in all of them, waiting to abuse and taunt when chance presented itself.”

— Colson Whitehead

284. “She gulped the air like water, the night sky the best meal she had ever had, the starts made succulent and ripe after her time below.”

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

286. “The whites were right to be afraid. One day the system would collapse in blood. An insurrection of one. She smiled for a moment, before the facts of her latest cell reasserted themselves. Scrabbling in the walls like a rat. Whether in the fields or underground or in an attic room America remained her warden.”

— Colson Whitehead

287. “Do not love for they will disappear, do not trust for you will be betrayed, do not stand up for you will be swatted down.”

— Colson Whitehead

288. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

290. “Stolen bodies working stolen land.”

— Colson Whitehead

291. “Now he thought about the poor man and his last view of earth: the groove of rust worn from the tub’s leaky faucet, like the ooze from a wound.”

— Colson Whitehead

292. “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

293. “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.”

— Colson Whitehead

294. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

296. “The cabins radiated permanence and in turn summoned timeless feelings in those who lived and died in them: envy and spite.”

— Colson Whitehead

297. “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

298. “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

299. “They were treated to the same Randall hospitality, the travesties so routine and familiar that they were a kind of weather, and the ones so imaginative in their monstrousness that the mind refused to accommodate them. 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

300. “And on the plantations, the overseers preserved the names of workers in rows of tight cursive, every name an asset, breathing capital, profit made flesh.”

— Colson Whitehead