Quotes from Colson Whitehead

The whites were right to be afraid. One day the system would collapse in blood. An

Archimedes, one of his first encyclopedia finds. Violence is the only lever big enough to move the world.

The white boys didn't get it as bad as the black boys, but they were not in Nickel because the world cared overmuch. Big Chet was their Great White Hope.

Carpenter snarled when he said the word, a mangy dog hoarding his bone:

The type of guys Pepper sought were single-room-occupancy men, hot-plate men, shitty tippers who never passed a pay phone without checking for errant dimes, and they dreamed of fire.

The publicity of the present day causes that no sooner is a discovery or an invention made than it is already improved upon and surpassed by competing efforts.

THE music stopped. The circle broke. Sometimes a slave will be lost in a brief eddy of liberation. In the sway of a sudden reverie among the furrows or while untangling the mysteries of an early-morning dream. In the middle of a song on a warm Sunday night. Then it comes, always—the overseer's cry, the call to work, the shadow of the master, the reminder that she is only a human being for a tiny moment across the eternity of her servitude. The

Verkligheten var en föränderlig skyltning i ett butiksfönster, manipulerad av händer när man inte såg, lockande och ständigt utom räckhåll.

Stulna kroppar som arbetade på stulen mark.

the immense exertion white people put into grinding them down

racial violence only becomes more vicious in its expression. It will not abate or disappear, not anytime soon

Wainwright was pale-skinned, but all the black boys knew from his hair and nose that he had some Negro blood. He beat the black boys for knowing what he pretended not to know about himself.

said. "It was full moon when we picked, but there was always blood.

My part is finished, my friends." 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?

She threw him a bone about the movement: 'Lyndon Johnson's carrying on President Kennedy's civil rights bill. And if that good old boy is doing right, you know things is changing. Be a whole different thing when you come home, Elwood.

if a bird could be taught limericks, a slave might be taught to remember as well. Merely glancing at the size of the skulls told you that a nigger possessed a bigger brain than a bird.

A plantation was a plantation; one might think one's misfortunes distinct, but the true horror lay in their universities.

the children make of it what they can. What they don't understand today, they might tomorrow. "The Declaration is like a map. You trust that it's right, but you only know by going out and testing it yourself.

The world continued to instruct: Do not love for they will disappear, do not trust for you will be betrayed, do not stand up for you will be swatted down. Still he heard those higher imperatives: Love and that

South Carolina has a much more enlightened attitude toward colored advancement than the rest of the south.

My father liked his Indian talk about the Great Spirit," Ridgeway said. "All these years later, I prefer the American spirit, the one that called us from the Old World to the New, to conquer and build and civilize. And destroy that what needs to be destroyed. To lift up the lesser races. If not lift up, subjugate. And if not subjugate, exterminate. Our destiny by divine prescription—the American imperative.

För det är vad man gör när man tar någons barn – stjäl deras framtid.

She said that white towns had simply banded together to rid themselves of the black stronghold in their midst. That is how the European tribes operate, she said. If they can't control it, they destroy it.

The vast fields burst with hundreds of thousands of white bolls, strung like stars in the sky on the clearest of clear nights.