Top 500 Colson Whitehead Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “Taken individually, the link was not much. But in concert with its fellows, a mighty iron that subjugated millions despite its weakness.”

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

404. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

406. “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

407. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

410. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

413. “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

414. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

419. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

421. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

423. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

426. “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

427. “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

428. “Carney’s father had torched a building or two in his day. It paid the rent.”

— Colson Whitehead

429. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

432. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

434. “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

435. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

438. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

444. “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

445. “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

446. “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

447. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

449. “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

450. “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