Top 500 Colson Whitehead Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “Hope is a gateway drug, don’t do it.”

— Colson Whitehead

302. “He was a strange mix – congenial but reserved in a way that told you being friendly was an act of will.”

— Colson Whitehead

303. “It’s not so different up there, Lila Mae. They have the same white people up there they got down here. It might look different. It might feel different. But it’s the same.”

— Colson Whitehead

304. “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

305. “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

306. “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

307. “According to the world, we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses. A paradox to the outside, but it never occurred to us that there was anything strange about it. It was simply who we were.”

— Colson Whitehead

308. “The property wasn’t much to look at, but it might make a man his fortune. Carney took the previous tenants’ busted schemes and failed dreams as a kind of fertilizer that helped his own ambitions prosper, the same way a fallen oak in its decomposition nourishes the acorn.”

— Colson Whitehead

309. “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

310. “From the trunk of their scheme, choices and decisions sprouted like branches and shoots.”

— Colson Whitehead

311. “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

312. “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

313. “Stolen bodies working stolen land.”

— Colson Whitehead

314. “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

315. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

317. “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

318. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

320. “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

321. “Once you got that old, you might as well be ninety-eight or a hundred and eight. Nothing left for the world to show you but the latest incarnations of cruelty.”

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

324. “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

325. “The Theresa desegregated in 1940, after the neighborhood tipped over from Jews and Italians and became the domain of Southern blacks and West Indians. Everyone who came uptown had crossed some variety of violent ocean.”

— Colson Whitehead

326. “Cora’s mother and Ava grew up on the plantation at the same time. 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.”

— Colson Whitehead

327. “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

328. “It’s one thing to understand the muck of things, accept it, live in it, and quite another to have that muck change so suddenly and dramatically, to stumble down to a newer, deeper shelf.”

— Colson Whitehead

329. “There was no hope for him as a colored man because the white world will not let a colored man rise, and there was no hope for him as a white man because it was a lie.”

— Colson Whitehead

330. “EVER since she saw a woodcut of a missionary surrounded by jungle natives, Ethel thought it would be spiritually fulfilling to serve the Lord in dark Africa, delivering savages to the light.”

— Colson Whitehead

331. “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

332. “But if people received their just portion of misfortune, what had she done to bring her troubles on herself?”

— Colson Whitehead

333. “At the end of the day when she propped him up and told him he could do it, he puzzled over these alien things she offered him. Kindness and faith, he didn’t know which box to put them in.”

— Colson Whitehead

334. “George sawed with his fiddle, the notes swirling up into night like sparks gusted from a fire.”

— Colson Whitehead

335. “She didn’t see anyone she recognized; their faces had been transformed by fear.”

— Colson Whitehead

336. “It was in the realm of his humor, and Carney had doubtless laughed. You get older and the old jokes grow less funny.”

— Colson Whitehead

337. “He was a curious boy. He wanted to be a dentist, a pragmatic choice. Teacher, doctor, preacher, undertaker. What a colored boy can aspire to in a world like this. Colored people always got bad teeth, always got a soul needed tending. Always dying.”

— Colson Whitehead

338. “Three months, I thought. In idle moments, I retreated into that early-summer dream of reinvention, when you set your eyes on September and that refurbished self you were going to tool around in, honking the horn so people would take notice...”

— Colson Whitehead

339. “She’d never been the first person to open a book.”

— Colson Whitehead

340. “True faith is too serious to have room for the distraction of passion.”

— Colson Whitehead

341. “The streets were shrinking, and she felt about the places they led to the same way she felt about her hair when she saw it on the bathroom floor after her mother cut it off.”

— Colson Whitehead

342. “Poems were too close to prayer, rousing regrettable passions. Waiting for God to rescue you when it was up to you.”

— Colson Whitehead

343. “They strung up the guilty and, in the interest of prevention, a robust percentage of the innocent.”

— Colson Whitehead

344. “In time the saplings and hedges on the perimeter would provide shade and character; now they spoke of fine intentions.”

— Colson Whitehead

345. “Do we judge a man by the weight of the envelope-or whom he gives it to?”

— Colson Whitehead

346. “Women and animals, you only have to break them in once, he said. They stay broke. All.”

— Colson Whitehead

347. “Or maybe she will keep it a garden. An anchor in the vicious waters of the plantation to prevent her from being carried away. Until she chose to be carried away.”

— Colson Whitehead

348. “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

349. “But if he didn’t read, he was a slave.”

— Colson Whitehead

350. “Hard to believe that reconstruction had progressed so far that clock-watching had returned, the slacker’s code, the concept of weekend.”

— Colson Whitehead