Top 500 Colson Whitehead Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “But nobody wanted to speak on the true disposition of the world. And no one wanted to hear it.”

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

303. “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

304. “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

305. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

307. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

309. “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

310. “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

311. “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

312. “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

313. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

316. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

318. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

320. “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

321. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

323. “If the correct things belonged to you, perhaps you might belong.”

— Colson Whitehead

324. “Cora never got his name, nor that of the town of departure. Just that he was another person of subterranean inclinations – and a taste for imported white tile. The walls of the station were covered with it.”

— Colson Whitehead

325. “Let one colored in and you’re integrated. Let two in, you got a race war as they try to kiss up to whitey.”

— Colson Whitehead

326. “She was sure he had claimed a hundred and one years at his last party. He was only half that, which meant he was the oldest slave anyone on the two Randall plantations had ever met. 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

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

— Colson Whitehead

328. “The mere fact of Vegas, its necessity, was an indictment of our normal lives. If we needed this place – to transform into a high roller or a sexy swinger, to be someone else, a winner for once – then certainly the world beyond the desert was a small and mealy place indeed.”

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

330. “The nervous talk was understandable; for most, this was their first visit with a doctor. On the Randall plantation, the doctor was only called when the slave remedies, the roots and salves, had failed and a valued hand was near death.”

— Colson Whitehead

331. “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

332. “The white man in the book, Gulliver, roved from peril to peril, each new island a new predicament to solve before he could return home. That was the man’s real trouble, not the savage and uncanny civilizations he encountered – he kept forgetting what he had. That was white people all over: Build a schoolhouse and let it rot, make a home then keep straying.”

— Colson Whitehead

333. “Sucker. The mistake was to believe he’d become someone else. That the circumstances that shaped him had been otherwise, or that to outrun those circumstances was as easy as moving to a better building or learning to speak right. Hard stop on the t. He knew where he stood now, had always known, even if he’d gotten confused; there was the matter of redress.”

— Colson Whitehead

334. “If two women were a flaw, what was a community?”

— Colson Whitehead

335. “Elwood dressed in the dark slacks from last year’s Emancipation Day play. He’d grown a few inches, so he let them out and they showed the barest sliver of his white socks. A new emerald tie clip held his black tie in place and the knot only took six attempts. His shoes glinted with polish. He looked the part, even if he still worried for his glasses if the police brought out nightsticks. If the whites carried iron pipes and baseball bats.”

— Colson Whitehead

336. “There was no recourse, were no laws but the ones rewritten every day.”

— Colson Whitehead

337. “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

338. “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

339. “Adult trouble was more permanent than Aunt Millie smacking you with a hairbrush or his father taking off his belt.”

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

341. “We were a made-for-TV family. Every new channel added to our lineup, every magnificent home-entertainment advance increased the possibility that we wouldn’t have to talk to one another.”

— Colson Whitehead

342. “On nights when Tom Bird felt separate from his life’s design, he shared stories of the Great Spirit. The Great Spirit lived in all things – the earth, the sky, the animals and forests – flowing through and connecting them in a divine thread.”

— Colson Whitehead

343. “His trick: Don’t speculate where the slave is headed next. Concentrate instead on the idea that he is running away from.”

— Colson Whitehead

344. “This sense of dignity.”

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

346. “When you remember this moment later you will understand that I was saying goodbye even if you did not know it.”

— Colson Whitehead

347. “Get them off the plantation and they learned to read, it was a disease.”

— Colson Whitehead

348. “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

349. “She wondered where he escaped from, how bad it was, and how far he traveled before he put it behind him.”

— Colson Whitehead

350. “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