Quotes from Colson Whitehead

To escape the boundary of the plantation was to escape the fundamental principles of your existence: impossible.

He thought this city was a good place for him because nobody knew him — And he liked the contradiction that the one place that did know him was the one place he didn't want to be.

Rumsey closed with an appeal for nurturing the artistic temperament in young and old alike, "to stoke that Apollonian ember in all mortal beings.

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

Here's a tip for new parents: Start lowering those expectations early, it's going to pay off later.

Harriet thought they should wake the boy. "Let him sleep," Evelyn said, and that was the last she heard from them. If her daughter had ever been suited for motherhood, she never demonstrated it. The look on her face when little Elwood suckled on her breast—her joyless, empty eyes seeing through the walls of the house and into pure nothing—chilled Harriet to the bone whenever she remembered it.

Watch and think and plan. Let the world be a mob—Elwood will walk through it. They might curse and spit and strike him, but he'd make it through to the other side. Bloodied and tired, but he'd make it through.

It wasn't until they were moving again that Cora realized she forgot to ask where they were headed.

Rumors have flourished in worse soil than this.

She took her hatchet. She took flint and tinder. And like her mother she dug up her yams.

The whites were right to be afraid. One day the system would collapse in blood. An insurrection of one. She smiled for a moment, before the facts of her latest cell reasserted themselves. Scrabbling in the walls like a rat. Whether in the fields or underground or in an attic room America remained her warden.

life is an argument with the world over time.

Each thing had a value and as the value changed, everything else changed also. A broken calabash was worth less than one that held its water, a hook that kept its catfish more prized than one that relinquished its bait. In America the quirk was that people were things.

all those hard-won and cherished animosities fell away for a few hours as they celebrated a rite of endurance and vicarious suffering. You can do it.

Now that she had run away and seen a bit of the country, Cora wasn't sure the document described anything real at all. America was a ghost in the darkness, like her.

each opportunity for escape was undermined by his certainty that things were about to go back to normal, that this savage new reality could not hold.

Each night, with meticulous care, Homer opened his satchel and removed a set of manacles. He locked himself to the driver's seat, put the key in his pocket, and closed his eyes. Ridgeway caught Cora looking. "He says it's the only way he can sleep." Homer snored like a rich old man every night.

Sometimes a workweek will grind you into sand, pulverize you into particles.

The world had whispered its rules to him for his whole life and he refused to listen, hearing instead a higher order.

One thing I've learned in my job is that life is cheap, and when things start getting expensive, it gets cheaper still.

The white men who wrote it didn't understand it either, if all men did not truly mean all men.

But nobody wanted to speak on the true disposition of the world. And no one wanted to hear it.

They were exiles, but Hob provided a type of protection once they settled in. By playing up their strangeness, the way a slave simpered and acted childlike to escape a beating, they evaded the entanglements of the quarter. The walls of Hob made a fortress some nights, rescuing them from the feuds and conspiracies. White men eat you up, but sometimes colored folk eat you up, too. She

it means what it say, Ethel said. It means that a Hebrew may not enslave a Hebrew. But the sons of Ham are not of that tribe. The were cursed, with black skin and tails. Where the Scripture condemns slavery, it is not speaking of negro slavery at all.