Top 500 Colson Whitehead Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

353. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

355. “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

356. “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

357. “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

358. “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.”

— Colson Whitehead

359. “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

360. “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

361. “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

362. “The white people do not see colored people, even in broad daylight, in the middle of town.”

— Colson Whitehead

363. “The whites were right to be afraid. One day the system would collapse in blood. An.”

— Colson Whitehead

364. “Three cheers for your rich interior life, may it serve you well come rent day.”

— Colson Whitehead

365. “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

366. “Gnaw on a disappointment long enough and it will lose all flavor.”

— Colson Whitehead

367. “He was jailed for inciting riots that weren’t riots but peaceful gatherings.”

— Colson Whitehead

368. “On visiting day, he told her he was okay but sad, it was difficult but he was hanging in there, when all he wanted to say was, Look at what they did to me, look at what they did to me.”

— Colson Whitehead

369. “Taken individually, the link was not much. But in concert with its fellows, a mighty iron that subjugated millions despite its weakness.”

— Colson Whitehead

370. “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

371. “The reunions were terrific and rote, early tutelage in the recursive nature of human experience.”

— Colson Whitehead

372. “I thought, This is where the day curdles.”

— Colson Whitehead

373. “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.”

— Colson Whitehead

374. “The light at this hour, on this street, is the secondhand gray of ghetto twilight, a dull mercury color.”

— Colson Whitehead

375. “I don’t get where it says, He that stealeth a man and sells him, shall be put to death,” Cora said. “But then later it says, Slaves should be submissive to their masters in everything – and be well-pleasing.” Either it was a sin to keep another as property, or it had God’s own blessing. But to be well-pleasing in addition? A slaver must have snuck into the printing office and put that in there.”

— Colson Whitehead

376. “Stickups were chops – they cook fast and hot, you’re in and out. A stakeout was ribs – fire down low, slow, taking your time.”

— Colson Whitehead

377. “It was a glorious June morning. The sun was shining, the birds were singing, the ambulances were screaming, and the daylight falling on last night’s crime scenes made the blood twinkle like dew in a green heaven.”

— Colson Whitehead

378. “I sleep poorly, but I nap rich.”

— Colson Whitehead

379. “Fear drove these people, even more than cotton money.”

— Colson Whitehead

380. “EVER since she saw a woodcut of a missionary surrounded by jungle natives, Ethel thought it would be spiritually fulfilling to serve the Lord in dark Africa, delivering savages to the light.”

— Colson Whitehead

381. “Antislavery literature was illegal in this part of the nation. Abolitionists and sympathizers who came down to Georgia and Florida were run off, flogged and abused by mobs, tarred and feathered. Methodists and their inanities had no place in the bosom of King Cotton. The planters did not abide contagion.”

— Colson Whitehead

382. “Anyone can start a religion. They just need the need of others.”

— Colson Whitehead

383. “Carpenter snarled when he said the word, a mangy dog hoarding his bone:.”

— Colson Whitehead

384. “George sawed with his fiddle, the notes swirling up into night like sparks gusted from a fire.”

— Colson Whitehead

385. “To build a House of Jerky is to triumph against the odds, to construct a nitrate-filled monument to possibility and individual perseverance. Dexter Choi was an outlaw. He faced down fate and flopped a full house.”

— Colson Whitehead

386. “Who knew the havoc and ruin they’d perpetrate if allowed to run free among decent people. Best to keep them all in here, on this island, bought for twenty-seven bucks from the Indians, the story went. Twenty-seven bucks went a lot further in those days.”

— Colson Whitehead

387. “Humiliation was his currency, but tonight Miss Laura had picked his pocket.”

— Colson Whitehead

388. “Someone helps you out by accident, it’s still help.”

— Colson Whitehead

389. “Whoever has the better stuff wins. Sound familiar, American lackeys of late-stage capitalism?”

— Colson Whitehead

390. “Sometimes a slave will be lost in a brief eddy of liberation.”

— Colson Whitehead

391. “He had a narrow raccoon face that drew Elwood’s attention to his tiny nose and dark circles under his eyes and thick bristly eyebrows. Spencer was fastidious with his dark blue Nickel uniform; every crease in his clothes looked sharp enough to cut, as if he were a living blade.”

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

393. “The owner of the plant store dipped her fingers into the soil of a pot earmarked for a city plant, one hearty in the way the shop’s customers were hearty, for wasn’t every citizen on the Grand Island a sort of sturdy indoor variety that didn’t need much sunlight.”

— Colson Whitehead

394. “The white men who wrote it didn’t understand it either, if all men did not truly mean all men.”

— Colson Whitehead

395. “He felt unreal those days of the riots when his streets were made strange by violence. Despite what America saw on the news, only a fraction of the community had picked up bricks and bats and kerosene. The devastation had been nothing compared to what lay before him now, but if you bottled the rage and hope and fury of all the people of Harlem and made it into a bomb, the results would look something like this.”

— Colson Whitehead

396. “Reconnected the dead to the living world that processed without them.”

— Colson Whitehead

397. “Picking had ruined his hands for delicate woodwork.”

— Colson Whitehead

398. “Make the letters blockier, so you can see it, put some red in there. He read an article that said red was a color favored by nature to make animals take notice, and you had to be part animal to live in New York City. Made sense to use red in signs, Pepper thought. But no one was asking him.”

— Colson Whitehead

399. “That was a temporary setback,” Zippo said. “If you call an opportunity to take stock and really think about how you can make your life better a ’setback.”

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead