Top 500 Colson Whitehead Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “The black city and the white city: overlapping, ignorant of each other, separate and connected by tracks.”

— Colson Whitehead

302. “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

303. “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

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. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

307. “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

308. “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

309. “Everyone had secret corners and alleys that no one else saw – what mattered were your major streets and boulevards, the stuff that showed up on other people’s maps of you.”

— Colson Whitehead

310. “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

311. “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

312. “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

313. “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

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

— 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. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

318. “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

319. “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

320. “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

321. “He remained imperturbable and strange.”

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

324. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

326. “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

327. “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

328. “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

329. “A free black walks different than a slave,” he said. “White people recognize it immediately, even if they don’t know it. Walks different, talks different, carries himself different. It’s in the bones.”

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

331. “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

332. “Things are pretty much status quo with the sexual-tension friend.”

— Colson Whitehead

333. “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

334. “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

335. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

337. “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

338. “I was a skinny guy, but I was morbidly obese with doom.”

— Colson Whitehead

339. “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

340. “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

341. “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

342. “After a lull in white arrests, some towns increased the rewards for turning in collaborators. Folks informed on business rivals, ancient nemeses, and neighbors, recounting old conversations where the traitors had uttered forbidden sympathies. Children tattled on their parents, taught by schoolmistresses the hallmarks of sedition.”

— Colson Whitehead

343. “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

344. “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

345. “Harriet Johnson was a slight hummingbird of a woman who conducted herself in everything with furious purpose.”

— Colson Whitehead

346. “No one remembered the unfortunate who had lent his name to the cabin. He lived long enough to embody qualities before being undone by them. Off to Hob with those who had been crippled by the overseers’ punishments, off to Hob with those who had been broken by the labor in ways you could see and in ways you could not see, off to Hob with those who had lost their wits. Off to Hob with strays.”

— Colson Whitehead

347. “Two other women took their own lives that spring, more than usual but nothing remarkable. No one with a name that would be remembered come winter, so shallow was their mark.”

— Colson Whitehead

348. “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

349. “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

350. “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