Colson Whitehead Quotes

18 Sourced Quotes

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
This need to rise is biological, transcending the vague physics of department store architecture. We choose the escalator, we choose the elevator, and these choices say much about who we are.

Colson Whitehead
Colored, Negro, Afro-American, African American. Every couple of years someone came up with something that got us an inch closer to the truth. Bit by bit we crept along. As if that thing we believed to be approaching actually existed.

Colson Whitehead
The city knows you better than any living person because it has seen you when you are alone,

Colson Whitehead
I'd never been much of an athlete, due to a physical condition I'd had since birth (unathleticism). Perhaps if there were a sport centered around lying on your couch in a neurotic stupor all day, I'd take an interest.

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

Colson Whitehead
What does the perfect elevator look like, the one that will deliver us from the cities we suffer now, these stunted shacks? We don't know because we can't see inside it, it's something we cannot imagine, like the shape of angels' teeth. It's a black box.

Colson Whitehead
His legs remembered the correct position for squatting down with toys. He played. He fit the round male studs into the round female grooves. He got some thinking done as he hunkered down on his fallen-sleep legs.

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

Colson Whitehead
It had been a humdrum couple of days, reaffirming his belief in reincarnation: everything was so boring that this could not be the first time he'd experienced it.

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

Colson Whitehead
Revise, revise, revise. I cannot stress this enough. Revision is when you do what you should have done the first time, but didn't. It's like washing the dishes two days later instead of right after you finish eating.

Colson Whitehead
No matter how long you have been here, you are a New Yorker the first time you say, That used to be Munsey's, or That used to be the Tic Toc Lounge.... You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.

Colson Whitehead
Best to let the broken glass be broken glass, let it splinter into smaller pieces and dust and scatter. Let the cracks between things widen until they are no longer cracks but the new places for things. That was where they were now. The world wasn't ending: it had ended and now they were in the new place. They could not recognize it because they had never seen it before.

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

Colson Whitehead
To put off the inevitable, we try to fix the city in place, remember it as it was, doing to the city what we would never allow to be done to ourselves.... New York City does not hold our former selves against us. Perhaps we can extend the same courtesy.

Colson Whitehead