Top 500 Colson Whitehead Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 8 of 10

351. “The streets were shrinking, and she felt about the places they led to the same way she felt about her hair when she saw it on the bathroom floor after her mother cut it off.”

— Colson Whitehead

352. “Poems were too close to prayer, rousing regrettable passions. Waiting for God to rescue you when it was up to you.”

— Colson Whitehead

353. “They strung up the guilty and, in the interest of prevention, a robust percentage of the innocent.”

— Colson Whitehead

354. “In time the saplings and hedges on the perimeter would provide shade and character; now they spoke of fine intentions.”

— Colson Whitehead

355. “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

356. “Do we judge a man by the weight of the envelope-or whom he gives it to?”

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

358. “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

359. “She thought of the picking, how it raced down the furrows at harvest, the African bodies working as one, as fast as their strength permitted. The vast fields burst with hundreds of thousands of white bolls, strung like stars in the sky on the clearest of clear nights. When the slaves finished, they had stripped the fields of their color. It was a magnificent operation, from seed to bale, but not one of them could be prideful of their labor. It had been stolen from them. Bled from them.”

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

361. “Hard to believe that reconstruction had progressed so far that clock-watching had returned, the slacker’s code, the concept of weekend.”

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

363. “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

364. “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

365. “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

366. “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

367. “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

368. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

370. “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

371. “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

372. “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

373. “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

374. “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

375. “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

376. “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

377. “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

378. “If two women were a flaw, what was a community?”

— Colson Whitehead

379. “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

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

— 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. “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

383. “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

384. “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

385. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

387. “This sense of dignity.”

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

389. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

391. “He remained imperturbable and strange.”

— Colson Whitehead

392. “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

393. “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

394. “The white men were silent. As if they’d given up or decided that a small freedom was the worst punishment of all, presenting the bounty of true freedom into painful relief. One.”

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

396. “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

397. “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

398. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

400. “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