Top 500 Colson Whitehead Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “Stolen bodies working stolen land.”

— Colson Whitehead

302. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

304. “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

305. “People get rid of plenty when they move – sometimes they’re changing not just places but personalities. Up or down “the economic ladder.” Maybe the bed won’t fit in the new place, or the sofa’s too boxy, or they’re newlyweds and put a new living-room set on their registry. A lot of these white-flight families splitting for the suburbs, Long Island and Westchester, they’re making a whole new start – shaking the city off, and that means getting rid of how they used to see themselves.”

— Colson Whitehead

306. “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

307. “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

308. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

310. “He stopped watching the movie a few years later when he realized he didn’t watch it because it was sort of corny, or they got the facts wrong, or it marked how far he had come, but because watching it made him sad, and a nutjob part of him sought out that sadness.”

— Colson Whitehead

311. “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

312. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

315. “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

316. “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

317. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

319. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

322. “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

323. “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

324. “A plane dragged black letters through the air: Happy Birthday America – 200 Years of Liberty and Independence. Who paid for it? He couldn’t tell, so he added: Love, Buckwheat.”

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

326. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

328. “Slavery as a moral issue never interested Ethel. If God had not meant for Africans to be enslaved, they wouldn’t be in chains. She did, however, have firm ideas about not getting killed for other people’s high-minded ideas.”

— Colson Whitehead

329. “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

330. “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

331. “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

332. “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

333. “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

334. “She pushed the plantation from her again. She was getting better at it. Her mind was wily though, twisty. Thoughts she did not like wormed in from the sides, from beneath, through the cracks, from places she had battened down.”

— Colson Whitehead

335. “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

336. “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

337. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

340. “This sense of dignity.”

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

342. “The world had whispered its rules to him for his whole life and he refused to listen, hearing instead a higher order. The world continued to instruct: 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. Still he heard those higher imperatives: Love and that love will be returned, trust in the righteous path and it will lead you to deliverance, fight and things will change.”

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

344. “The signs had been there since he could walk, and he perfected the more distasteful aspects of his personality as he lurched into manhood and assumed his responsibilities.”

— Colson Whitehead

345. “Like the best storms, rush hour starts out as a slight drizzle, then becomes unholy deluge.”

— Colson Whitehead

346. “The doctor was a frequent visitor at Miss Trumball’s establishment, preferring it to the Lanchester house, whose girls had a saturnine disposition in his opinion, as if imported from Maine or other gloom-loving provinces.”

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

348. “I was one of them on the dance floor and they were one of me. I jostled, was jostled in turn, collision as communication: I am here, we’re here together. The bass bounced my shirt on my chest.”

— Colson Whitehead

349. “He thought this city was a good place for him because nobody knew him – And he liked the contradiction that the one place that did know him was the one place he didn’t want to be.”

— Colson Whitehead

350. “He’d broken through into a small corner of American success where his race did not curse him. Some might have lived in that space happily, rising alone. Lander wanted to make room for others. People were wonderful company sometimes.”

— Colson Whitehead