Top 500 Colson Whitehead Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “Carney’s father had torched a building or two in his day. It paid the rent.”

— Colson Whitehead

402. “Even if the adults were free of the shackles that had held them fast, bondage had stolen too much time. Only the children could take full advantage of their dreaming. If white men let them.”

— Colson Whitehead

403. “The paint hung in thin rinds from the ceiling, and the sooty windows turned every hour overcast.”

— Colson Whitehead

404. “That was the man’s real trouble, not the savage and uncanny civilizations he encountered – he kept forgetting what he had.”

— Colson Whitehead

405. “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

406. “There was a message there, if he could teach himself the language.”

— Colson Whitehead

407. “My first fight made me cockeyed,” he said, “and my farewell fight set my eyes right again, so trust me when I say this sport will break you down to make you better, and that’s a fact.”

— Colson Whitehead

408. “I can’t help it if I understand that everything tends to ruin. Over our heads, Skylab is eternally falling down, I can see it all, the debris raining without cessation. I was a skinny guy, but I was morbidly obese with doom.”

— Colson Whitehead

409. “The secret triumph you keep in your heart.”

— Colson Whitehead

410. “It had been a cool dawn. Wisps of white moisture hovered over the ground.”

— Colson Whitehead

411. “Things are happening too fast for her to convince herself that she does not need time to think, to get to the bottom of things.”

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

413. “What else was an ongoing criminal enterprise complicated by periodic violence for, but to make your wife happy?”

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

415. “He heard the sound of teeth splintering.”

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

417. “Is this the truth of our historic encounter?”

— Colson Whitehead

418. “I contain multitudes, most of them flawed.”

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

420. “America was big and blighted in gamey spots by racial intolerance and violence. Visiting relatives in Georgia? Here are the safe routes around the sundown towns and cracker territories where you might not make it out alive, the towns and counties to be avoided if you valued your life.”

— Colson Whitehead

421. “My part is finished, my friends.” He embraced the runaways with desperate affection. Cora couldn’t help but shrink away. Two white men in two days had their hands around her. Was this a condition of her freedom?”

— Colson Whitehead

422. “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

423. “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

424. “Understanding that something is always lost when it comes to human beings.”

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

426. “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

427. “Optimism skipped out on the rent a while back, but the cynic in the penthouse won’t leave until led out by marshals.”

— Colson Whitehead

428. “In this world, however, his reward was that void attending most human endeavor, with which all are well acquainted. His accomplishments, such as they were, gathered on the heap of the unsung.”

— Colson Whitehead

429. “To preempt rejection she dresses to exaggerate her difference when the true enemy is not the world’s disdain but its indifference. He is surely the next item in a dreary procession and cannot be seen for all those previous disappointments.”

— Colson Whitehead

430. “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

431. “In America the quirk was that people were things. Best to cut your losses on an old man who won’t survive a trip across the ocean.”

— Colson Whitehead

432. “I wrote two five-page short stories, two five-page epics, to audition for my college’s creative writing workshops, and was turned down both times. I was crushed, but in retrospect it was perfect training for being a writer. You can keep ‘write what you know’ – for a true apprenticeship, internalize the world’s indifference and accept rejection and failure into your very soul.”

— Colson Whitehead

433. “That’s that. I’m not saying that anything nefarious happened, only saying what happened.” He gestured for a refill. “One thing I’ve learned in my job is that life is cheap, and when things start getting expensive, it gets cheaper still.”

— Colson Whitehead

434. “Sandra knew how to handle herself, whether dealing with the kitchen staff or the impetuous attentions of customers. Dancing at the Apollo was a tutorial in the male animal, after all.”

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

436. “When you talk about this trip, and you will, because it was quite a journey and you witnessed many things, there were ups and downs, sudden reversals of fortune and last-minute escapes, it was really something, you will see your friends nod in recognition.”

— Colson Whitehead

437. “The worst sort of scoundrels took up the chase. Drunkards, incorrigibles, poor whites who didn’t even own shoes delighted in this opportunity to scourge the colored population.”

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

439. “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

440. “The vast fields burst with hundreds of thousands of white bolls, strung like stars in the sky on the clearest of clear nights.”

— Colson Whitehead

441. “The boy made a fist. He knew what he’d do if the man put his hand on his leg or tried to touch his thing. He’d vowed to sock Freddie Rich in the face many times and then stood paralyzed when the time came, but this day he felt he could actually do it. Drawing strength from the free world.”

— Colson Whitehead

442. “In his life, Donald wrapped himself in a kind of quiet that, depending on the observer, signaled imbecility or a reservoir of mystery.”

— Colson Whitehead

443. “Lander’s talk verged on a sermon, concerning the dilemma of finding your purpose once you’ve slipped the yoke of slavery. The manifold frustrations of liberty.”

— Colson Whitehead

444. “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

445. “Step back and the world is a classroom if need be.”

— Colson Whitehead

446. “I lit fires because I didn’t know back then it was enough to see it in my head,” Zippo said. “I didn’t have to do it. That’s why people dig my boudoir photographs. Seeing it can be the same thing as doing it.”

— Colson Whitehead

447. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

450. “Her price fluctuated. When you are sold that many times, the world is teaching you to pay attention.”

— Colson Whitehead