Top 500 Colson Whitehead Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “Patriots boasted of how often they’d been searched and given a clean bill.”

— Colson Whitehead

402. “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

403. “Hard work was the fundamental thing. For hard work did not allow time for marches.”

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

405. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

407. “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

408. “Favorite pots showed their dark bottoms from hooks and gaily colored flowers from the pasture leaned out of thin glassware.”

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

411. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

413. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

416. “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

417. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

421. “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

422. “Like the best storms, rush hour starts out as a slight drizzle, then becomes unholy deluge.”

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

424. “The girl’s vulgarities reminded Cora of the plantation and the stream of oaths delivered by the hands when master’s eye was not on them. The small rebellion of servants everywhere.”

— Colson Whitehead

425. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

427. “We go solo, my kinfolk and I, taking each day as an IKEA bookcase we build alone, sans instructions. The leftover pieces? We gobble them down, and sometimes it’s the only thing we eat all day.”

— Colson Whitehead

428. “Verticality is such a risky enterprise.”

— Colson Whitehead

429. “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

430. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

433. “This sense of dignity.”

— Colson Whitehead

434. “I had a roll of non sequiturs in my pockets and I was just tossing them out across the water trying to get a good skip going.”

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

437. “After a few hands, I realized he was talking about me. The dismissive gesture in my direction tipped me off. I hadn’t been glared at with such hate by two people since couples therapy.”

— Colson Whitehead

438. “She didn’t agree with the popular arguments for slavery but saw it as a necessary evil given the obvious intellectual deficiencies of the African tribe. To free them from bondage all at once would be disastrous – how would they manage their affairs without a careful and patient eye to guide them?”

— Colson Whitehead

439. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

441. “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

442. “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

443. “They can turn rabid at any second; this is the true result of gathering integration: the replacement of sure violence with deferred sure violence.”

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

446. “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

447. “It was a night in late August, a night that rekindled in rattling windows and tree branch palsy that lost recollection of autumn, misplaced for the succession of bright summer distractions, trapped heat in small rooms and sweaty underarms.”

— Colson Whitehead

448. “He was a curious boy. He wanted to be a dentist, a pragmatic choice. Teacher, doctor, preacher, undertaker. What a colored boy can aspire to in a world like this. Colored people always got bad teeth, always got a soul needed tending. Always dying.”

— Colson Whitehead

449. “Harriet thought they should wake the boy. “Let him sleep,” Evelyn said, and that was the last she heard from them. If her daughter had ever been suited for motherhood, she never demonstrated it. The look on her face when little Elwood suckled on her breast – her joyless, empty eyes seeing through the walls of the house and into pure nothing – chilled Harriet to the bone whenever she remembered it.”

— Colson Whitehead

450. “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