Quotes from Colson Whitehead

When they got to Oklahoma there were still more white people waiting for them, squatting on the land the Indians had been promised in the latest worthless treaty. Slow learners, the bunch.

The first one hundred pages were fueled by early Misfits ("Where Eagles Dare [fast version]," "Horror Business," "Hybrid Moments") and Blanck Mass ("Dead Format"). David Bowie is in every book, and I always put on Purple Rain and Daydream Nation when I write the final pages; so thanks to him and Prince and Sonic Youth.

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

Turner had never met a kid like Elwood before. Sturdy was the word he returned to, even though the Tallahassee boy looked soft, conducted himself like a goody-goody, and had an irritating tendency to preach. Wore eyeglasses you wanted to grind underfoot like a butterfly. He talked like a white college boy, read books when he didn't have to, and mined them for uranium to power his own personal A-bomb. Still--sturdy.

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. Under

People get rid of plenty when they move--sometimes they're changing not just places but personalities.

Robbing the Hotel Theresa was like taking a piss on the Statue of Liberty. It was like slipping Jackie Robinson a Mickey the night before the World Series.

During his term at Nickel, the Mexican boy sidestepped the squabbles that embroiled the rest of them, the uncounted disputes over psychological turf and endless encroachments. His constant dorm reassignments notwithstanding, Jaimie kept a quiet profile and conducted himself in accordance with the Nickel handbook's rules of conduct—a miracle, since no one had ever seen the handbook despite its constant invocations by the staff. Like justice, it existed in theory.

When the state of Florida dug him up fifty years later, the forensic examiner noted the fractures in the wrists and speculated that he'd been restrained before he died, in addition to the other violence attested by the broken bones. Most of those who know the story of the rings in the trees are dead by now. The iron is still there. Rusty. Deep in the heartwood. Testifying to anyone who cares to listen.

All men are created equal, unless we decide that you are not a man.

What a world it is, Cora thought, that makes a living prison into your only haven. Was she out of bondage or in its web: how to describe the status of a runaway?

If you believed in the holy circulation of envelopes, everything that went down happened because a man took an envelope and didn't do his job. An envelope is an envelope. Disrespect the order and the whole system breaks down.

Problem was, even if you avoided trouble, trouble might reach out and snatch you anyway. Another student might sniff out a weakness and start something, one of the staff dislikes your smile and knocks it off your face. You might stumble into a bramble of bad luck of the sort that got you here in the first place.

sometimes laughter knocked out a few bricks from the barricade of segregation, so tall and so wide.

Their daddies taught them how to keep a slave in line, passed down this brutal heirloom.

What did you get for that, for knowing the day you were born into the white man's world? It didn't seem like the thing

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

Nowdays, Rosie the Rivetere was a former soccer mom who had just opened her own catering business when Last Night came down and her husband and kids were eaten by a parking attendant at the local megamall's discount- appliance emporium.

The championship would be their sole acquaintance with justice at Nickel.

Before I came back to North Carolina, I'd never seen a mob rip a man limb from limb," Martin said. "See that, you stop saying what folks will do and what they won't." True

I'm what the botanists call a hybrid," he said the first time Cora heard him speak. "A mixture of two different families. In flowers, such a concoction pleases the eye. When that amalgamation takes its shape in flesh and blood, some take great offense. In this room we recognize it for what it is—a new beauty come into the world, and it is in bloom all around us.

When the work was done, and the day's punishments, the night waited as an arena for their true loneliness and despair.

Hipsters seek refuge in church, Our Lady of Perpetual Subculture. There is some discussion as to whether or not they are still cool but then they are calmed by the obscure location and the arrival of their kind. Keep the address to yourself, let the rabble fund it themselves. Wow, this crappy performance art is really making me feel no so terrible about my various emotional issues.

This isn't going to un-fuck itself.