Colson Whitehead Quotes

see chains on another person and be glad they are not your own--such was the good fortune permitted colored people, defined by how much worse it could be at any moment.

~ Colson Whitehead

I can't blame modern technology for my predilection for distraction, not after all the hours I've spent watching lost balloons disappear into the clouds. I did it before the Internet, and I'll do it after the apocalypse, assuming we still have helium and weak-gripped children.

~ Colson Whitehead

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

~ Colson Whitehead

The word we. We are not one people but many different people. How can one person speak for this great, beautiful race--which is not one race but many, with a million desires and hopes and wished for ourselves and our children?

~ Colson Whitehead

And America, too, is a delusion, the grandest one of all. The white race believes--believes with all its heart--that it is their right to take the land. To kill Indians. Make war. Enslave their brothers. This nation shouldn't exist, if there is any justice in the world, for its foundations are murder, theft, and cruelty. Yet here we are.

~ Colson Whitehead

The whites were right to be afraid. One day the system would collapse in blood. An insurrection of one. She smiled for a moment, before the facts of her latest cell reasserted themselves. Scrabbling in the walls like a rat. Whether in the fields or underground or in an attic room America remained her warden.

~ Colson Whitehead

Cora had heard Michael recite the Declaration of Independence back on the Randall plantation many times, his voice drifting through the village like an angry phantom. She didn't understand the words, most of them at any rate, but 'created equal' was not lost on her. The white men who wrote it didn't understand it either, if 'all men' did not truly mean all men.

~ Colson Whitehead

But nobody wanted to speak on the true disposition of the world. And no one wanted to hear it...The whites came to this land for a fresh start and to escape the tyranny of their masters, just as the Freeman had fled theirs. But the ideals they held up for themselves, they denied others. Cora had heard Michael recite the Declaration of Independence back on the Randall plantation many times, his voice drifting through the village like an angry phantom. She didn't understand the words, most of them at any rate, but created equal was not lost on her. The white men who wrote it didn't understand it either, if all men did not truly mean all men. Not if they snatched away what belonged to other people, whether it was something you could hold in your hand, like dirt, or something you could not, like freedom.

~ Colson Whitehead

Freedom was a thing that shifted as you looked at it, the way a forest is dense with the trees up close but from the outside, from the empty meadow, you see its true limits. Being free had nothing to do with chains or how much space you had. On the plantation, she was not free, but she moved unrestricted on its acres, tasting the air and tracing the summer stars. The place was big in its smallness. Here, she was free of her master but slunk around a warren so tiny she couldn't stand.

~ Colson Whitehead

You swallow hard when you discover that the old coffee shop is now a chain pharmacy, that the place where you first kissed so-and-so is now a discount electronics retailer, that where you bought this very jacket is now rubble behind a blue plywood fence and a future office building. Damage has been done to your city. You say, ''It happened overnight.'' But of course it didn't. Your pizza parlor, his shoeshine stand, her hat store: when they were here, we neglected them. For all you know, the place closed down moments after the last time you walked out the door. (Ten months ago? Six years? Fifteen? You can't remember, can you?) And there have been five stores in that spot before the travel agency. Five different neighborhoods coming and going between then and now, other people's other cities. Or 15, 25, 100 neighborhoods. Thousands of people pass that storefront every day, each one haunting the streets of his or her own New York, not one of them seeing the same thing.

~ Colson Whitehead

Two people, two hands, and two songs, in this case Big Shot and Bette Davis Eyes. The lyrics of the two songs provided no commentary, honest or ironic, on the proceedings. They were merely there and always underfoot, the insistent gray muck that was pop culture. It stuck to our shoes and we tracked it through our lives.

~ Colson Whitehead

As time went on, we learned to arm ourselves in our different ways. Some of us with real guns, some of us with more ephemeral weapons, an idea or improbable plan or some sort of formulation about how best to move through the world. An idea that will let us be. Protect us and keep us safe. But a weapon nonetheless.

~ Colson Whitehead

Versifying left her cold. Poems were too close to prayer, rousing regrettable passions. Waiting for God to rescue you when it was up to you. Poetry and prayer put ideas in people's heads that got them killed, distracting them from the ruthless mechanism of the world.

~ Colson Whitehead

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

~ Colson Whitehead

He had met this sort of white man before, earnest and believing what came out of their mouths. The veracity of their words was another matter, but at least they believed them. The southern white man was spat from the loins of the devil and there was no way to forecast his next evil act.

~ Colson Whitehead

Mark Spitz didn't ask about Harry. You never asked about the characters that disappeared from a Last Night story. You knew the answer. The plague had a knack for narrative closure.

~ Colson Whitehead

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

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

~ Colson Whitehead

Men start off good and then the world makes them mean. The world is mean from the start and gets meaner every day. It uses you up until you only dream of death.

~ Colson Whitehead

As it often did when I thought about chicken wings and entropy, my mind turned to Emerson. Life is a journey, not a destination. Now that was one stone-cold motherfucker who was not afraid to deliver the truth: After the torments of the journey, you have been well-prepared for the agonies of the destination.

~ Colson Whitehead

In keeping with my family's affection for doomed product lines and hexed formats, we purchased a Betamax. The year before, we'd bought a TRS-80 instead of an Apple II, and in due course we'd unbox Mattel's Intellivision, instead of Atari's legendary gizmo. This was good training for a writer, for the sooner you accept the fact that you are a deluded idiot who is always out of step with reality the better off you will be.

~ Colson Whitehead

There was one moment of intersection, when the topic of hate-watching came up. Why do you watch TV shows--and keep watching them--if you don't like them? Terrence asked.Simple: Some days, all you have is gazing upon horror, and the small comfort of being surprised that it is not yours.

~ Colson Whitehead

You should have gone yourself, you ask for a Coke and they come back with orange drink. No one understands the martyrdom of the volunteers for the trip to food concession.

~ Colson Whitehead

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

~ Colson Whitehead

The only time early bloomer has ever been applied to me is vis-a-vis my premature apprehension of the deep dread-of-existence thing. In all other cases, I plod and tromp along. My knuckles? Well dragged.

~ Colson Whitehead

Now that she had run away and seen a bit of the country, Cora wasn't sure the document described anything real at all. America was a ghost in the darkness, like her.

~ Colson Whitehead

The land she tilled and worked had been Indian land. She knew the white men bragged about the efficiency of the massacres, where they killed women and babies, and strangled their futures in the crib. Stolen babies working stolen land. It was an engine that did not stop, its hungry boiler fed with blood.

~ Colson Whitehead

If niggers were supposed to have their freedom, they wouldn't be in chains. If the red man was supposed to keep hold of his land, it'd still be his. If the white man wasn't destined to take this new world, he wouldn't own it now.Here was the true Great Spirit, the divine thread connecting all human endeavor--if you can keep it, it is yours. Your property, slave or continent. The American imperative.

~ Colson Whitehead

The other patrollers were boys and men of bad character; the work attracted a type. In another country they would have been criminals, but this was America.

~ Colson Whitehead

An elevator doesn’t exist without its freight. If there’s no one to get on, the elevator remains in quiescence. The elevator and the passenger need each other.

~ Colson Whitehead

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

~ Colson Whitehead

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.

~ Colson Whitehead

They don't give gold bracelets for regrets.

~ Colson Whitehead

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

~ Colson Whitehead

Resentment was the hinge of her personality.

~ Colson Whitehead

Her father dropped her off in front of the place where she was to live and left the engine running. Lila Mae removed the two suitcases from the back of the pickup truck. The suitcases were new, with a formidable casing of green plastic. Scratchproof, supposedly. Her father had only been able to afford them because they were, manufacturer's oats aside, scratched — gouged actually, as if an animal had taken them in its fangs to teach them about hubris.

~ Colson Whitehead

He imagined a town called A. Around the communal fire they’re shaping arrowheads and carving tributes o the god of the hunt. One day some guys with spears come over the ridge, perform all kinds of meanness, take over, and the new guys rename the town B. Whereupon they hang around the communal fire sharpening arrowheads and carving tributes to the god of the hunt. Some climatic tragedy occurs — not carving the correct tributary figurines probably — and the people of B move farther south, where word is there’s good fishing, at least according to those who wander to B just before being cooked for dinner. Another tribe of unlucky souls stops for the night in the emptied village, looks around at the natural defenses provided by the landscape, and decides to stay awhile. It’s a while lot better than their last digs — what with the lack of roving tigers and such — plus it comes with all the original fixtures. they call the place C, after their elder, who has learned that pretending to talk to spirits is a fun gag that gets you stuff. Time passes. More invasions, more recaptures, D, E, F, and G. H stands as it is for a while. That ridge provides some protection from the spring floods, and if you keep a sentry up there you can see the enemy coming for miles. Who wouldn’t want to park themselves in that real estate? The citizens of H leave behind cool totems eventually toppled by the people of I, whose lack of aesthetic sense if made up for by military acumen. J, K, L, adventures in thatched roofing, some guys with funny religions from the eastern plains, long-haired freaks from colder climes, the town is burned to the ground and rebuilt by still more fugitives. This is the march of history. And conquest and false hope. M falls to plague, N to natural disaster — same climatic tragedy as before, apparently it’s cyclical. Mineral wealth makes it happen for the O people, and the P people are renowned for their basket weaving. No one ever — ever — mentions Q. The dictator names the city after himself; his name starts with the letter R. When the socialists come to power they spend a lot of time painting over his face, which is everywhere. They don’t last. Nobody lasts because there’s always somebody else. They all thought they owned it because they named it and that was their undoing. They should have kept the place nameless. They should have been glad for their good fortune, and left it at that. X, Y, Z.

~ Colson Whitehead

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

~ 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

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

~ Colson Whitehead