Colson Whitehead Quotes

They were up past dawn, crashed, were granted absolution in its secular manifestation of late checkout.

Sometimes such an experience bound one person to another; just as often the shame of one's powerlessness made all witnesses into enemies.

A monster is a person who has stopped pretending.

You are a soulless monster whose fright mask is incapable of capturing human expressions.

Truth was a changing display in a shop window, manipulated by hands when you weren't looking, alluring and ever out of reach.

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

And for the second time that day he blesses the certainty of airports because he can always turn around and go someplace else.

Cherish your old apartments and pause for a moment when you pass them. Pay tribute, for they are the caretakers for your reinventions.

The Four Questions?" "As put forth by Mettleheim: How did this happen? How could this happen? Is it exceptional? How will it be avoided in the future?

IF THEY THINK those two words New York will fix them, who are we to say otherwise.

She has always considered herself an atheist, not realizing she had a religion.

The negro's story may have started in this country with degradation, but triumph and prosperity would be his one day.

By making a circle of themselves that separated the human spirits within from the degradation without. Noble

There were plenty of things in the world that deserved to stay dead, yet they walked.

It wasn't until they were moving again that Cora realized she forgot to ask where they were headed.

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

There will be no redemption because the men who run this place do not want redemption. They want to be as near to hell as they can.

Lesson: If you're going to view blinds as taxes, be a Republican about them.

Stolen bodies working stolen land. It was an engine that did not stop, its hungry boiler fed with blood.

Everyone was fucked up in their own way; as before, it was a mark of one's individuality.

In her Georgia misery she had pictured freedom, and it had not looked like this. Freedom was a community laboring for something lovely and rare. Mingo

The world is mean from the start and gets meaner every day. It uses you up until you only dream of death. Mabel

of a runaway? Freedom was a thing that shifted as you looked at it, the way a forest is dense with trees up close but from outside, from the

Memory is the most malicious cutter of all, preserving, recasting, panning in slow motion across the awful bits so that we retain every detail.

Maybe we become New Yorkers the day we realize that New York will go on without us.

From the trunk of their scheme, choices and decisions sprouted like branches and shoots.

A plantation was a plantation; one might think one's misfortunes distinct, but the true horror lay in their universality.

Stubborn breaks when it don't bend,

Did you know that smiling politely burns up the same amount of calories as speaking your mind.

He hovered on unexceptionality.

Sanctimony and self-regard are as American as smallpox blankets and supersize meals.

The I-Remember-Whensters lumbered in with their musty catalogues of the bygone, dragging IVs of distilled nostalgia behind them on creaky wheels,

What isn't said is as important as what is said.

In the slow motion that is the speed of humiliation.

It was the softest bed she had ever lain in. But then, it was the only bed she had ever lain in.

Sometimes good fortune is just having fewer messed-up things happening to you.

If you were a thing - a cart or a horse or a slave - your value determined your possibilities.

It is failure that guides evolution; perfection provides no incentive for improvement, and nothing is perfect.

Money was new and unpredictable and liked to go where it pleased. Some

Here's a tip for new parents: Start lowering those expectations early, it's going to pay off later.

A society manufactures the heroes it requires.

'Sag Harbor' was a very different book for me. It changed the way I thought about books that I wanted to do.

The world may be mean, but people don't have to be, not if they refuse.

In the dank utility room deep in the subbasements of my personality, a little man wiped his hands on his overalls and pulled the switch: More.

Two white men in two days had their hands around her. Was this a condition of her freedom? Caesar

Poetry and prayer put ideas in people's heads that got them killed, distracting them from the ruthless mechanism of the world.

I'm just trying to keep things rich for me creatively and for the readers who follow me.

He was a rube, but he was no tourist.

New York City in life was much like New York City in death. It was still hard to get a cab, for example.

At ninety, everything is air and the difference between you and the medium of your passage is disintegrating with every increment of the ascension.

She wondered why there were only two kinds of weather: hardship in the morning, and tribulation at night.

Google "brooklyn writer" and you'll get, Did you mean: the future of literature as we know it?

Even angels are animals.

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

Judge not the dysfunctions of others, let ye be judged.

Craftsmen and artisans created items that were brittle rumors compared with his father's iron facts.

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

Talking about New York is a way of talking about the world.

You can't rush inspiration.

Pain could be killed. Sadness could not, but the drugs did shut its mouth for a time.

Pick your fights like you pick your nose: with complete awareness of where you are.

memory has a palette and broad brush.

Rumors have flourished in worse soil than this.

You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.

There was an order of misery, misery tucked inside miseries, and you were meant to keep track.

Live every minute as if you are late for the last train.

But we have all been branded even if you can't see it, inside if not without

This isn't going to un-fuck itself.

Three cheers for your rich interior life, may it serve you well come rent day.

Racial prejudice rotted one's faculties.

New York City does not hold our former selves against us. Perhaps we can extend the same courtesy.

The future? The future was the clay in their hands.

He possessed a strange facility for the mandatory.

Life! What Inscrutable Card Shall Ye Throw Next Upon the Soft Felt of Our Days?

Georgina hailed from Delaware and had that vexing way of Delaware ladies, delighting in puzzles.

Weeks passed, but my Word-A-Day Calendar was stuck on motherfucker.

Their lives had been an interminable loop of repeated gestures; now their existences were winnowed to this discrete and eternal moment.

He told himself: Hope is a gateway drug, don't do it.

Somewhere, years ago, she had stepped off the path of life and could no longer find her way back to the family of people.

We never see other people anyway, only the monsters we make of them.

You go on about reasons," Cora said. "Call things by other names as if it changes what they are. But that don't make them true.

She wasn't surprised when his character revealed itself - if you waited long enough, it always did. Like the dawn.

The only way to know how long you are lost in the darkness is to be saved from it.

This city is reward for all it will enable you to achieve and punishment for all the crimes it will force you to commit.

And what else but a being cursed with the burden of free will would wear a poncho.

That's how the European tribes operate, she said. If they can't control it, they destroy it.

But who can resist the seductions of elevators these days, those stepping stones to Heaven, which make relentless verticality so alluring?

But it's like riding a bike. A hell-bike, made out of hell.

I was inspired to become a writer by horror movies and science fiction.

In other words, fiction is payback for those who have wronged you.

Freedom was a community laboring for something lovely and rare.

Don't be afraid: you have a best seller on your hands.

Why not remove his desk, bring in a treadmill, hang a carrot from the ceiling and stop all pretense already.

Sometimes a useful delusion is better than a useless truth.

The buttons of his dark blue uniform allude to an ongoing border dispute with his soft belly.

One day a pickaninny was happy and the next the light was gone from them; in between they had been introduced to a new reality of bondage.

Why should anyone else have it easy. Spoken like a true New Yorker.

She gulped the air like water, the night sky the best meal she had ever had, the starts made succulent and ripe after her time below.

Sarsaparilla boiled for one of Sybil's tonics, overpowering the aroma of the roasting meat. Cora

If I have three ideas and I'm working on one more than the others, that sort of tells me that I should work on that one.