Top 500 Colson Whitehead Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

403. “A man should have a safe big enough to hold his secrets. Bigger even, so you have room to grow.”

— Colson Whitehead

404. “Sleep the sleep of the successful because somehow you made it through the day without anyone finding out that you are a complete fraud.”

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

407. “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

408. “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

409. “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

410. “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

411. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

416. “Entrepreneur?” Pepper said the last part like manure. “That’s just a hustler who pays taxes.”

— Colson Whitehead

417. “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

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

— 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. “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

421. “Her new life required a different sort of strength. She was meticulous in her posture, a walking spear, in the manner of those who’d been made to bend and will bend no more.”

— Colson Whitehead

422. “As before, home was a beloved barricade. When school, work, the many-headed beast of strangers and villains comprising the world threatened to destroy, home remained, family remained, and the locks would hold, the lullabies would ward off all bogeymen. He was trapped in this house and he couldn’t think of where else he’d rather be.”

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

424. “Patriots boasted of how often they’d been searched and given a clean bill.”

— Colson Whitehead

425. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

428. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

430. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

434. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

436. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

439. “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

440. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

444. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

447. “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

448. “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

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

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead