Quotes from Colson Whitehead

And America, too, is a delusion, the grandest one of all. The white race believes--believes with all its heart--that it is their right to take the land. To kill Indians. Make war. Enslave their brothers

There are instruments and human players but sometimes a fiddle or a drum makes instruments of those who play them, and all are put in servitude to the song.

Keep on the path and you will not see the ruined people, so do not stray from the path.

She'd never been the first person to open a book.

She pushed the plantation from her again. She was getting better at it. Her mind was wily though, twisty. Thoughts she did not like wormed in from the sides, from beneath, through the cracks, from places she had battened down.

Not because any attack on his brother was an attack on himself, like they said in church, but because for him to do nothing was to undermine his own dignity.

Lander's talk verged on a sermon, concerning the dilemma of finding your purpose once you've slipped the yoke of slavery. The manifold frustrations of liberty.

If you want to see what this nation is all about, I always say, you have to ride the rails. Look outside as you speed through, and you'll find the true face of America.' He slapped the wall of the boxcar as a signal. The train lurched forward.

That was the man's real trouble, not the savage and uncanny civilizations he encountered--he kept forgetting what he had.

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.

But if he didn't read, he was a slave.

Racial prejudice rotted one's faculties, he said.

May the next traveler not tarry and keep moving up the line, all the way to liberty.

If that happened to the harmless places, what do you think the haunted places looked like?

He'd broken through into a small corner of American success where his race did not curse him. Some might have lived in that space happily, rising alone. Lander wanted to make room for others. People were wonderful company sometimes.

Nie chodzi tylko o to, ?eby przetrwa?, ale aby ?y?.

The iron horse still rumbled through the tunnel when she woke. Lumbly's words returned to her: 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. It was a joke, then, from the start. There was only darkness outside the windows on her journeys, and only ever would be darkness.

He was jailed for inciting riots that weren't riots but peaceful gatherings.

She wondered where he escaped from, how bad it was, and how far he traveled before he put it behind him.

How to get through the day if every indignity capsized you in a ditch? One learned to focus one's attention.

It was a magnificent operation, from seed to bale, but not one of them could be prideful of their labor. It had been stolen from them. Bled from them.

of a runaway? Freedom was a thing that shifted as you looked at it, the way a forest is dense with trees up close but from outside, from the

Sometimes a slave will be lost in a brief eddy of liberation.

It was in the realm of his humor, and Carney had doubtless laughed. You get older and the old jokes grow less funny.