Quotes from Colson Whitehead

Stickups were chops - they cook fast and hot, you're in and out. A stakeout was ribs - fire down low, slow, taking your time.

True faith is too serious to have room for the distraction of passion.

The elevator world will look like Heaven but not the Heaven you have reckoned.

I'm all for your people. You might not think so, but I am. I'm all for colored progress, but gradual. You can't do everything overnight--that would be chaos.

The atmosphere in Nightbirds was ever five minutes after a big argument and no one telling you what happened. Everyone in their neutral corners replaying KO's and low blows and devising too-late parries. You didn't know what it had been about or who'd won, just that nobody wanted to talk about it, they glance around and knead grudges in their fists.

She was surrounded by men and women who'd been born in Africa, or born in chains, who had freed themselves or escaped. Branded, beaten, raped. Now they were here. They were free and black and stewards of their own fates. It made her shiver.

That burden of carrying an apartment on your back; you stagger sometimes but you take the weight, what else can you do?

After a few hands, I realized he was talking about me. The dismissive gesture in my direction tipped me off. I hadn't been glared at with such hate by two people since couples therapy.

I sleep poorly, but I nap rich

He was a curious boy. He wanted to be a dentist, a pragmatic choice. Teacher, doctor, preacher, undertaker. What a colored boy can aspire to in a world like this. Colored people always got bad teeth, always got a soul needed tending. Always dying.

I wrote two five-page short stories, two five-page epics, to audition for my college's creative writing workshops, and was turned down both times. I was crushed, but in retrospect it was perfect training for being a writer. You can keep 'write what you know'—for a true apprenticeship, internalize the world's indifference and accept rejection and failure into your very soul.

Turns out if you write about police violence and atrocities, if you wait a month, it'll happen again, so... That's America.

I didn't have illusions about being one of the November Nine. We live in an age in which sitcoms outnumber miracles, and perhaps that is what we deserve.

Memory is the past with volume control.

The white people do not see colored people, even in broad daylight, in the middle of town.

To build a House of Jerky is to triumph against the odds, to construct a nitrate-filled monument to possibility and individual perseverance. Dexter Choi was an outlaw. He faced down fate and flopped a full house.

Me...squinting in discomfort at the discovery of some new defect in the design of the world.

They can turn rabid at any second; this is the true result of gathering integration: the replacement of sure violence with deferred sure violence.

Three months, I thought. In idle moments, I retreated into that early-summer dream of reinvention, when you set your eyes on September and that refurbished self you were going to tool around in, honking the horn so people would take notice...

If the correct things belonged to you, perhaps you might belong.

we got sanded. In the towels, scalps, clumping on sweat along our limbs. It had begun, the gritification of the day.

According to the world, we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses. A paradox to the outside, but it never occurred to us that there was anything strange about it. It was simply who we were.

She has one pair of worn sneakers, left over from when she first moved to the city and spent long hours on trudging marches between the buildings. Each time she came to the city's edges and saw the churning brown rivers beyond, Lila Mae would hit a right angle and turn back into the buildings, deeper in. She'd never experienced anonymity like that: it's as if the place stimulates enzymes that form a carapace.

brought down the roof of the doghouse, and a squeal from the dog, who had just had his tail