Colson Whitehead Quotes
Collection of top 100 famous quotes about Colson Whitehead
Colson Whitehead Quotes & Sayings
Happy to read and share the best inspirational Colson Whitehead quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.
They were up past dawn, crashed, were granted absolution in its secular manifestation of late checkout.
— Colson Whitehead
Sometimes such an experience bound one person to another; just as often the shame of one's powerlessness made all witnesses into enemies.
— Colson Whitehead
I'm here because I was born here and thus ruined for anywhere else, but I don't know about you.
— Colson Whitehead
You are a soulless monster whose fright mask is incapable of capturing human expressions.
— Colson Whitehead
Truth was a changing display in a shop window, manipulated by hands when you weren't looking, alluring and ever out of reach.
— Colson Whitehead
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
And for the second time that day he blesses the certainty of airports because he can always turn around and go someplace else.
— Colson Whitehead
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?
— Colson Whitehead
IF THEY THINK those two words New York will fix them, who are we to say otherwise.
— Colson Whitehead
The negro's story may have started in this country with degradation, but triumph and prosperity would be his one day.
— Colson Whitehead
By making a circle of themselves that separated the human spirits within from the degradation without. Noble
— Colson Whitehead
There were plenty of things in the world that deserved to stay dead, yet they walked.
— Colson Whitehead
She wondered where he escaped from, how bad it was, and how far he traveled before he put it behind him.
— Colson Whitehead
In death the negro became a human being. Only then was he the white man's equal. On
— Colson Whitehead
Crossing a single street transformed the way people talked, determined the size and condition of the homes, the dimension and character of the dreams.
— Colson Whitehead
Lesson: If you're going to view blinds as taxes, be a Republican about them.
— Colson Whitehead
Stolen bodies working stolen land. It was an engine that did not stop, its hungry boiler fed with blood.
— Colson Whitehead
Everyone was fucked up in their own way; as before, it was a mark of one's individuality.
— Colson Whitehead
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
— Colson Whitehead
On one end there was who you were before you went underground, and on the other end a new person steps out into the light.
— Colson Whitehead
The world is mean from the start and gets meaner every day. It uses you up until you only dream of death. Mabel
— Colson Whitehead
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
— Colson Whitehead
Maybe we become New Yorkers the day we realize that New York will go on without us.
— Colson Whitehead
A plantation was a plantation; one might think one's misfortunes distinct, but the true horror lay in their universality.
— Colson Whitehead
Stubborn breaks when it don't bend,
— Colson Whitehead
Did you know that smiling politely burns up the same amount of calories as speaking your mind.
— Colson Whitehead
He hovered on unexceptionality.
— Colson Whitehead
Slavery is a sin when whites were put to the yoke, but not the African. All men are created equal, unless we decide you are not a man.
— Colson Whitehead
Sanctimony and self-regard are as American as smallpox blankets and supersize meals.
— Colson Whitehead
The I-Remember-Whensters lumbered in with their musty catalogues of the bygone, dragging IVs of distilled nostalgia behind them on creaky wheels,
— Colson Whitehead
I was a skinny guy, but I was morbidly obese with doom.
— Colson Whitehead
What isn't said is as important as what is said.
— Colson Whitehead
In the slow motion that is the speed of humiliation.
— Colson Whitehead
It was the softest bed she had ever lain in. But then, it was the only bed she had ever lain in.
— Colson Whitehead
Things are pretty much status quo with the sexual-tension friend.
— Colson Whitehead
If you were a thing - a cart or a horse or a slave - your value determined your possibilities.
— Colson Whitehead
It is failure that guides evolution; perfection provides no incentive for improvement, and nothing is perfect.
— Colson Whitehead
Here's a tip for new parents: Start lowering those expectations early, it's going to pay off later.
— Colson Whitehead
A society manufactures the heroes it requires.
— Colson Whitehead
'Sag Harbor' was a very different book for me. It changed the way I thought about books that I wanted to do.
— Colson Whitehead
The world may be mean, but people don't have to be, not if they refuse.
— Colson Whitehead
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.
— Colson Whitehead
The city knows you better than any living person because it has seen you when you are alone.
— Colson Whitehead
That's how the European tribes operate, she said. If they can't control it, they destroy it.
— Colson Whitehead
Well, imagine you are alone in a room....Are you the best, most special person in the room right now? Yes. That's the gift of being alone.
— Colson Whitehead
They don't give gold bracelets for regrets.
— Colson Whitehead
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.
— Colson Whitehead
Their lives had been an interminable loop of repeated gestures; now their existences were winnowed to this discrete and eternal moment.
— Colson Whitehead
But who can resist the seductions of elevators these days, those stepping stones to Heaven, which make relentless verticality so alluring?
— Colson Whitehead
He told himself: Hope is a gateway drug, don't do it.
— Colson Whitehead
Don't be afraid: you have a best seller on your hands.
— Colson Whitehead
Somewhere, years ago, she had stepped off the path of life and could no longer find her way back to the family of people.
— Colson Whitehead
We never see other people anyway, only the monsters we make of them.
— Colson Whitehead
And what else but a being cursed with the burden of free will would wear a poncho.
— Colson Whitehead
This city is reward for all it will enable you to achieve and punishment for all the crimes it will force you to commit.
— Colson Whitehead
But it's like riding a bike. A hell-bike, made out of hell.
— Colson Whitehead
Why not remove his desk, bring in a treadmill, hang a carrot from the ceiling and stop all pretense already.
— Colson Whitehead
But if he didn't read, he was a slave.
— Colson Whitehead
Resentment was the hinge of her personality.
— Colson Whitehead
I was inspired to become a writer by horror movies and science fiction.
— Colson Whitehead
She wasn't surprised when his character revealed itself - if you waited long enough, it always did. Like the dawn.
— Colson Whitehead
The only way to know how long you are lost in the darkness is to be saved from it.
— Colson Whitehead
Freedom was a community laboring for something lovely and rare.
— Colson Whitehead
In other words, fiction is payback for those who have wronged you.
— Colson Whitehead
Google "brooklyn writer" and you'll get, Did you mean: the future of literature as we know it?
— Colson Whitehead
Mark Spitz backed away from the fucking corn.
— Colson Whitehead
You can't rush inspiration.
— Colson Whitehead
Talking about New York is a way of talking about the world.
— Colson Whitehead
Poems were too close to prayer, rousing regrettable passions. Waiting for God to rescue you when it was up to you.
— Colson Whitehead
Craftsmen and artisans created items that were brittle rumors compared with his father's iron facts.
— Colson Whitehead
Judge not the dysfunctions of others, let ye be judged.
— Colson Whitehead
There was no recourse, were no laws but the ones rewritten every day.
— Colson Whitehead
Even angels are animals.
— Colson Whitehead
Pain could be killed. Sadness could not, but the drugs did shut its mouth for a time.
— Colson Whitehead
She wondered why there were only two kinds of weather: hardship in the morning, and tribulation at night.
— Colson Whitehead
At ninety, everything is air and the difference between you and the medium of your passage is disintegrating with every increment of the ascension.
— Colson Whitehead
New York City in life was much like New York City in death. It was still hard to get a cab, for example.
— Colson Whitehead
He was a rube, but he was no tourist.
— Colson Whitehead
I'm just trying to keep things rich for me creatively and for the readers who follow me.
— Colson Whitehead
Poetry and prayer put ideas in people's heads that got them killed, distracting them from the ruthless mechanism of the world.
— Colson Whitehead
Two white men in two days had their hands around her. Was this a condition of her freedom? Caesar
— Colson Whitehead
This isn't going to un-fuck itself.
— Colson Whitehead
Georgina hailed from Delaware and had that vexing way of Delaware ladies, delighting in puzzles.
— Colson Whitehead
I have a good poker face because I am half dead inside.
— Colson Whitehead
He possessed a strange facility for the mandatory.
— Colson Whitehead
The future? The future was the clay in their hands.
— Colson Whitehead
New York City does not hold our former selves against us. Perhaps we can extend the same courtesy.
— Colson Whitehead
Racial prejudice rotted one's faculties.
— Colson Whitehead
Weeks passed, but my Word-A-Day Calendar was stuck on motherfucker.
— Colson Whitehead
But we have all been branded even if you can't see it, inside if not without
— Colson Whitehead
Live every minute as if you are late for the last train.
— Colson Whitehead
There was an order of misery, misery tucked inside miseries, and you were meant to keep track.
— Colson Whitehead
You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.
— Colson Whitehead
Rumors have flourished in worse soil than this.
— Colson Whitehead
memory has a palette and broad brush.
— Colson Whitehead
