Top 500 Colson Whitehead Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

353. “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

354. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

356. “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

357. “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

358. “The world had whispered its rules to him for his whole life and he refused to listen, hearing instead a higher order.”

— Colson Whitehead

359. “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

360. “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

361. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

364. “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

365. “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

366. “She is mistress to her personality and well accustomed to reminding her more atavistic inclinations that the world is the world and the odd punch or eye-gouge will not make it any other way.”

— Colson Whitehead

367. “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

368. “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

369. “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

370. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

372. “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

373. “There was pain and then there was pain. Different magnitudes you could stand or not stand. Wetting your beak and wetting your beak.”

— Colson Whitehead

374. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

376. “Puedes cambiar una ley, pero no puedes cambiar a la gente ni la manera en que se tratan unos a otros.”

— Colson Whitehead

377. “As before, home was a beloved barricade. When school, work, the many-headed beast of strangers and villains comprising the world threatened to destroy, home remained, family remained, and the locks would hold, the lullabies would ward off all bogeymen. He was trapped in this house and he couldn’t think of where else he’d rather be.”

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

379. “Patriots boasted of how often they’d been searched and given a clean bill.”

— Colson Whitehead

380. “May the next traveler not tarry and keep moving up the line, all the way to liberty.”

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

382. “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

383. “Who are you after you finish something this magnificent – in constructing it you have also journeyed through it, to the other side.”

— Colson Whitehead

384. “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

385. “Time enough for Cora to take stock of her journey from Randall and make a thick braid of her misfortunes.”

— Colson Whitehead

386. “She understood that the library would be empty if these scholars knew Fulton was colored. No one would have worshipped him, his books probably would never have been published at all, or would exist under a different name, the name of the plagiarizing white man Fulton had been fool enough to share his theories with.”

— Colson Whitehead

387. “The cookies were stale and the fortunes discouraging.”

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

389. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

391. “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

392. “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

393. “That burden of carrying an apartment on your back; you stagger sometimes but you take the weight, what else can you do?”

— Colson Whitehead

394. “Cora hoped the musicians wouldn’t think them rude for their inattention. It was unlikely. Playing their music as freemen and not chattel was probably still a cherished novelty. To attack the melody without the burden of providing one of the sole comforts of their slave village. To practice their art with liberty and joy.”

— Colson Whitehead

395. “Weary and a little desperate, but also high-hearted. He turned off the lights.”

— Colson Whitehead

396. “Cora blamed the people who wrote it down. People always got things wrong, on purpose as much as by accident.”

— Colson Whitehead

397. “She had never seen him rush or hurry. The man moved with exquisite calm, like a leaf drifting on the surface of a pond, making its own way on gentle currents.”

— Colson Whitehead

398. “This slow debate about the rain: it’s not about rain at all, but the fragility of what we know. We’re all just guessing.”

— Colson Whitehead

399. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead