Top 500 Colson Whitehead Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 6 of 10

251. “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

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

255. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

257. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

259. “Saturdays in Sag Harbor, I liked to lie in bed listening to the weekend rev itself up.”

— Colson Whitehead

260. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

263. “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

264. “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

265. “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

266. “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

267. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

269. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

271. “It was a glorious June morning. The sun was shining, the birds were singing, the ambulances were screaming, and the daylight falling on last night’s crime scenes made the blood twinkle like dew in a green heaven.”

— Colson Whitehead

272. “If that happened to the harmless places, what do you think the haunted places looked like?”

— Colson Whitehead

273. “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

274. “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

275. “If you weren’t a little dirty at the end of the day, you weren’t much of a man.”

— Colson Whitehead

276. “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

277. “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

278. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

282. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

284. “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

285. “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

286. “Three cheers for your rich interior life, may it serve you well come rent day.”

— Colson Whitehead

287. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

289. “Because to walk around with that in your mind and do nothing was to die.”

— Colson Whitehead

290. “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

291. “Dibs was dibs, we didn’t have to call it. Ever since we were born, we’d lived according to the rough frontier justice of even Stephen, and even Stephen had a perfect memory.”

— Colson Whitehead

292. “The black city and the white city: overlapping, ignorant of each other, separate and connected by tracks.”

— Colson Whitehead

293. “Desmond had a round head, chubby baby cheeks, and a voice that startled everyone the first time they heard it, it was so gruff and full of bass. His voice made the chucks jump when he crept up on them, and he got a kick out of it, until one day a supervisor with an even deeper voice crept up on him and taught him a lesson.”

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

295. “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

296. “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

297. “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

298. “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

299. “Estas fantasias la consolaban cuando el peso que soportaba amenazaba con romperla en mil pedazos.”

— Colson Whitehead

300. “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