Quotes from Colson Whitehead

With that, the argument ended, the latest meaningless border skirmish in the long war over what white culture was acceptable and what was not.

The Monday vise clenched. Here was that end-of-weekend despair, the death of amusement and the winnowing of the reprieve.

Dibs was dibs, we didn't have to call it. Ever since we were born, we'd lived according to the rough frontier justice of even Stephen, and even Stephen had a perfect memory.

sometimes good fortune is just having fewer messed-up things happening to you.

New York City in death was very much like New York City in life. It was still hard to get a cab, for example.

Some kids rebelled to get attention. I did stupid things very carefully, spending all of my time thinking of ways to engineer small stupid things without getting caught. Things so small that no one else could see them and only I knew about them. But there I was last night, being stupid in a group, and of course that broke my rules and look where it got me.

I would represent my country, the Republic of Anhedonia. We have no borders, but the population teems. No one has deigned to write down our history, but we are an ancient land, founded during the original disappointments, when the first person met another person.

memory has a palette and broad brush.

The french-fry smell was almost another person in our room, stumbling around in the dark

She is mistress to her personality and well accustomed to reminding her more atavistic inclinations that the world is the world and the odd punch or eye-gouge will not make it any other way.

There was pain and then there was pain. Different magnitudes you could stand or not stand. Wetting your beak and wetting your beak.

It's one thing to understand the muck of things, accept it, live in it, and quite another to have that muck change so suddenly and dramatically, to stumble down to a newer, deeper shelf.

I contain multitudes, most of them flawed.

Saturdays in Sag Harbor, I liked to lie in bed listening to the weekend rev itself up.

Things are happening too fast for her to convince herself that she does not need time to think, to get to the bottom of things.

As before, home was a beloved barricade. When school, work, the many-headed beast of strangers and villains comprising the world threatened to destroy, home remained, family remained, and the locks would hold, the lullabies would ward off all bogeymen. He was trapped in this house and he couldn't think of where else he'd rather be.

We were a made-for-TV family. Every new channel added to our lineup, every magnificent home-entertainment advance increased the possibility that we wouldn't have to talk to one another.

the buttons of his dark blue uniform allude to an ongoing border dispute with his soft belly.

As it turned out, one aspect of my personality would help me in my odyssey: I was a bider. Temperamentally suited to hold out for good cards, well accustomed to waiting. We Anhedonians have adapted to long periods between good news. Our national animal is the hope camel. We have no national bird. All the birds are dead.

Step back and the world is a classroom if need be.

I thought, This is where the day curdles.

Bottom line: A man has a mind to place an ad and possesses the means, you run the ad. Save the censorship for the front page.

drones convened on stools and soft, low-slung couches, whipping out the measuring tape to see who had the biggest complaint and trying to forget that the minute you bury the miserable day it rises from its coffin the next morning, this monster. Jennifer's invite text received an eager response. She was a quick drinker who bullied and heckled her comrades into keeping pace. She'd make sure he got a full dose of medicine.

We go solo, my kinfolk and I, taking each day as an IKEA bookcase we build alone, sans instructions. The leftover pieces? We gobble them down, and sometimes it's the only thing we eat all day.