Top 500 Colson Whitehead Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

254. “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

255. “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

256. “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

257. “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

258. “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

259. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

262. “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

263. “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

264. “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

265. “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

266. “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

267. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

269. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

272. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

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

— Colson Whitehead

277. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

279. “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

280. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

283. “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

284. “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

285. “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

286. “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

287. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

290. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

292. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

294. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

296. “High-minded idiocy pitted against the power of coin.”

— Colson Whitehead

297. “He remained imperturbable and strange.”

— Colson Whitehead

298. “The white men were silent. As if they’d given up or decided that a small freedom was the worst punishment of all, presenting the bounty of true freedom into painful relief. One.”

— Colson Whitehead

299. “Strivers grasped for something better-and crooks schemes about how to manipulate the present system. The world as it might be versus the world as it was. But perhaps Carney was being too stark. Plenty of crooks were strivers, and plenty of strivers bent the law.”

— Colson Whitehead

300. “That was Sea Island cotton the slaver had ordered for his rows, but scattered among the seeds were those of violence and death, and that crop grew fast. 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