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Top 500 Colson Whitehead Quotes (2025 Update)
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Colson Whitehead Quote: “They strung up the guilty and, in the interest of prevention, a robust percentage of the innocent.”
Colson Whitehead Quote: “In time the saplings and hedges on the perimeter would provide shade and character; now they spoke of fine intentions.”
Colson Whitehead Quote: “HOLLYWOODING: Using all your years of deceiving others to put on a show at the table. Ever said, “Cute baby,” about some newborn who’d found a portal between their Hell Dimension and our world? You may have a career in poker.”
Colson Whitehead Quote: “Do we judge a man by the weight of the envelope-or whom he gives it to?”
Colson Whitehead Quote: “The moon grew fat and thin, there were solstices, first frosts and spring rains. All these things proceeded without the interference of men. She tried to imagine what the tide looked like, coming in and going out, nipping at the sand like a little dog, heedless of people and their machinations. Her strength returned.”
Colson Whitehead Quote: “Women and animals, you only have to break them in once, he said. They stay broke. All.”
Colson Whitehead Quote: “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 Quote: “But if he didn’t read, he was a slave.”
Colson Whitehead Quote: “Hard to believe that reconstruction had progressed so far that clock-watching had returned, the slacker’s code, the concept of weekend.”
Colson Whitehead Quote: “If the correct things belonged to you, perhaps you might belong.”
Colson Whitehead Quote: “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 Quote: “I’m all for your people. You might not think so, but I am. I’m all for colored progress, but gradual. You can’t do everything overnight – that would be chaos.”
Colson Whitehead Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “Time enough for Cora to take stock of her journey from Randall and make a thick braid of her misfortunes.”
Colson Whitehead Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “White men squabbled before judges over claims to this or that tract hundreds of miles away that had been carved up on a map. Slaves fought with equal fervor over their tiny parcels at their feet.”
Colson Whitehead Quote: “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 Quote: “The man with the handlebar mustache had a scar that dug from his lip to the middle of his cheek, as if he’d wriggled free from a fisherman’s hook.”
Colson Whitehead Quote: “If two women were a flaw, what was a community?”
Colson Whitehead Quote: “There was no recourse, were no laws but the ones rewritten every day.”
Colson Whitehead Quote: “May the next traveler not tarry and keep moving up the line, all the way to liberty.”
Colson Whitehead Quote: “Adult trouble was more permanent than Aunt Millie smacking you with a hairbrush or his father taking off his belt.”
Colson Whitehead Quote: “And if you could make a study of the dead, Stevens thought from time to time, you could make a study of the living, and make them testify as no cadaver could.”
Colson Whitehead Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “Hard work was the fundamental thing. For hard work did not allow time for marches.”
Colson Whitehead Quote: “His trick: Don’t speculate where the slave is headed next. Concentrate instead on the idea that he is running away from.”
Colson Whitehead Quote: “This sense of dignity.”
Colson Whitehead Quote: “When you remember this moment later you will understand that I was saying goodbye even if you did not know it.”
Colson Whitehead Quote: “Puedes cambiar una ley, pero no puedes cambiar a la gente ni la manera en que se tratan unos a otros.”
Colson Whitehead Quote: “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 Quote: “Get them off the plantation and they learned to read, it was a disease.”
Colson Whitehead Quote: “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 Quote: “Like the best storms, rush hour starts out as a slight drizzle, then becomes unholy deluge.”
Colson Whitehead Quote: “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 Quote: “She wondered where he escaped from, how bad it was, and how far he traveled before he put it behind him.”
Colson Whitehead Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “That burden of carrying an apartment on your back; you stagger sometimes but you take the weight, what else can you do?”
Colson Whitehead Quote: “The old woman had destroyed his family so thoroughly it couldn’t have been accidental. It wasn’t her niece’s greed – the old woman had played a trick on them the whole time.”
Colson Whitehead Quote: “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 Quote: “Verticality is such a risky enterprise.”
Colson Whitehead Quote: “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 Quote: “There were hours when every last person on Earth thought they were the last person on Earth, and it was precisely this thought of final, irrevocable isolation that united them all.”
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