Quotes from Colson Whitehead

Favorite pots showed their dark bottoms from hooks and gaily colored flowers from the pasture leaned out of thin glassware.

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

Poems were too close to prayer, rousing regrettable passions. Waiting for God to rescue you when it was up to you.

venturing now or after nightfall. Cora thought better

scattered parkgoers. Cora hunkered and

He embraced the runaways with desperate affection. Cora couldn't help but shrink away. Two white men in two days had their hands around her. Was this a condition of her freedom?

And if you could make a study of the dead, Stevens thought from time to time, you could make a study of the living, and make them testify as no cadaver could.

accomplice," Ridgeway said. "Caesar. Did it make

Manhattan was empty except for soldiers and legions of the damned, and already gentrification had resumed.

Poetry and prayer put ideas in people's heads that got them killed, distracting them from the ruthless mechanism of the world. After

Sometimes the fever subsided, but the plantation was always still there. Cora did not pray.

It will enrich your spirit as nothing else can. it will give you that rare sense of nobility that can only spring from love and selflessly helping your fellow man. Make a career of humanity. Make it a central part of your life.

Black hands built the White House, the seat of our nation's government. 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 wishes for ourselves and our children?

At the end of the day when she propped him up and told him he could do it, he puzzled over these alien things she offered him. Kindness and faith, he didn't know which box to put them in.

La única forma de saber cuánto tiempo te has perdido en la oscuridad es que te saquen de ella.

tracking by the good full moon to sanctuary.

Freedom was a community laboring for something lovely and rare. Mingo

It was easy to root for the winners. No, he liked the punch-drunk ones, half walking at mile twenty-three, tongues flapping like Labradors. Tumbling across the finish line by hook or by crook, feet pounded to bloody meat in their Nikes. The laggards and limpers who weren't running the course but running deep into their character—down into the cave to return to the light with what they found.

By making a circle of themselves that separated the human spirits within from the degradation without. Noble

America was big and blighted in gamey spots by racial intolerance and violence. Visiting relatives in Georgia? Here are the safe routes around the sundown towns and cracker territories where you might not make it out alive, the towns and counties to be avoided if you valued your life.

the full moon, the white beacon that so often agitated the slave with a mind to run.

Do not doubt you inspire with every breath, that every breath is a marvel of engineering.

The worst sort of scoundrels took up the chase. Drunkards, incorrigibles, poor whites who didn't even own shoes delighted in this opportunity to scourge the colored population.

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.