Quotes from Colson Whitehead

But we have all been branded even if you can't see it, inside if not without—and the wound from Randall's cane was the very same thing, marking her as his.

Elwood saw that he was always simultaneously at home in whatever scene he found himself and also seemed like he shouldn't have been there; inside and above at the same time; a part and apart. Like a tree trunk that falls across a creek—it doesn't belong and then it's never not been there, generating its own ripples in the larger current.

overseers and bosses had increased their scrutiny and would be extra vigilant on the full moon, the white beacon that so often agitated the slave with a mind to run.

Stolen bodies working stolen land. It was an engine that did not stop, its hungry boiler fed with blood. With the surgeries that Dr. Stevens described, Cora

The moon grew fat and thin, there were solstices, first frosts and spring rains. All these things proceeded without the interference of men. She tried to imagine what the tide looked like, coming in and going out, nipping at the sand like a little dog, heedless of people and their machinations. Her strength returned.

The nervous talk was understandable; for most, this was their first visit with a doctor. On the Randall plantation, the doctor was only called when the slave remedies, the roots and salves, had failed and a valued hand was near death.

Over time, Elwood saw that he was always simultaneously at home in whatever scene he found himself and also seemed like he shouldn't have been there; inside and above at the same time; a part and apart. Like a tree trunk that falls across a creek—it doesn't belong and then it's never not been there, generating its own ripples in the larger current.

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

If you want to see what this nation is all about, you have to ride the rails. Look outside as you speed through, and you'll find the true face of America.

There was an order of misery, misery tucked inside miseries, and you were meant to keep track. The

She was sure he had claimed a hundred and one years at his last party. He was only half that, which meant he was the oldest slave anyone on the two Randall plantations had ever met. Once you got that old, you might as well be ninety-eight or a hundred and eight. Nothing left for the world to show you but the latest incarnations of cruelty.

My first fight made me cockeyed," he said, "and my farewell fight set my eyes right again, so trust me when I say this sport will break you down to make you better, and that's a fact.

Poetry and prayer put ideas in people's heads that got them killed

He was a strange mix--congenial but reserved in a way that told you being friendly was an act of will.

The old woman had destroyed his family so thoroughly it couldn't have been accidental. It wasn't her niece's greed—the old woman had played a trick on them the whole time.

He cleared his throat, he gestured, and remained a black ghost, store after store, accumulating the standard humiliations, until he climbed the black iron steps to Aronowitz & Sons and the proprietor asked, "Can I help you, sir?" Can I help you as in Can I help you? As opposed to What are you doing here? Ray Carney, in his years, had a handle on the variations.

The Great War had always been between the white and the black. It always would be.

The paint hung in thin rinds from the ceiling, and the sooty windows turned every hour overcast.

On nights when Tom Bird felt separate from his life's design, he shared stories of the Great Spirit. The Great Spirit lived in all things—the earth, the sky, the animals and forests—flowing through and connecting them in a divine thread.

Their daddies taught them how to keep a slave in line, passed down this brutal heirloom. Take him away from his family, whip him until all he remembers is the whip, chain him up so all he knows is chains. A term in an iron sweatbox, cooking his brains in the sun, had a way of bringing a buck around, and so did a dark cell, a room aloft in darkness, outside time.

farmhouses and shacks, the families settling

Truth was a changing display in a shop window, manipulated by hands when you weren't looking, alluring and ever out of reach. The whites came to this land for a fresh start and to escape the tyranny of their masters, just as the freemen had fled theirs. But the ideals they held up for themselves, they denied others.

Where their pink necks emerged from the linen, that's where you strike, the vulnerable inch.

Cora didn't know what optimistic meant. She asked the other girls that night if they were familiar with the word. None of them had heard it before. She decided that it meant trying.