Quotes from Colson Whitehead

Tennessee was cursed. Initially, she assigned the devastation of Tennessee, the blaze and the disease, to justice. The whites got what they deserved for enslaving her people, for massacring another race, for stealing the very land itself. Let them burn by flame or fever, let the destruction started here roll acre by acre until the dead have been avenged. But if people received their just portion of misfortune, what had she done to bring her troubles on herself?

The first time Caesar approached Cora about running north, she said no.

It appeared before her one night in the attic like a spark, a small and simple truth

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

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

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

What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, because in the end, whatever goes down, whatever you get up to, your triumphs and transgressions, nobody actually understands what it means except for you.

He was a mote cycling in the wheels of a giant clock. Millions of people tended to this magnificent contraption, they lived and sweated and toiled in it, serving the mechanism of metropolis and making it bigger, better, story by glorious story and idea by unlikely idea. How small he was, tumbling between the teeth.

Black people always found a way in the most miserable circumstances. If we didn't, we'd have been exterminated by the white man long ago.

Part of moving up in the world is realizing how much shit you used to eat.

I feel about my phone the way horror-movie ventriloquists feel about their dummies: It's smarter than me, better than me, and I will kill anyone who comes between us.

He was all of them in one black body that night in the ring, and all of them when the shite men took him out back to those two iron rings.

In his mind, the business of existence was about minimizing consequences. The plague had raised the stakes, but he had been in training for this his whole life.

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.

How to get through the day if every indignity capsized you in a ditch? One learned to focus one's attention.

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

The whites got what they deserved. For enslaving her people, for massacring another race, for stealing the very land itself. Let them burn by flame or fever, let the destruction started here rove acre by acre until the dead have been avenged.

Violence is the only lever big enough to move the world.

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.

In another country they would have been criminals, but this was America.

In America the quirk was that people were things.

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

She is alone with an unattended desk light whose electricity is an expenditure waiting to be itemized and eliminated in the next budget of Lift magazine, Covering the Elevator Industry for Thirty Years.

Since the night she was kidnapped she had been appraised and reappraised, each day waking upon the pan of a new scale. Know your value and you know your place in the order. To escape the boundary of the plantation was to escape the fundamental principles of your existence: impossible. It