Quotes from Colson Whitehead

Happy hour was impenetrable, as bedraggled 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.

Sometimes when you had your head down in the [ice cream] vats, time stopped. The swirling white mist stalled in the air, hanging like ribbons. All sound dropped out, the whirring of the blender and the radio, and even the static-y buzz of your own thoughts. I don't know where I went during these spells. They only lasted a few moments yet they contained a little scoop of the infinite, a waffle-perfumed eternity.

He was aware of his body as a shell. Fragile, thin as excuses. A vessel containing the dust of his essential him-ness which would be lost when the vessel failed. Well, that was the way of the world. For a time he was fixed in his body, stuck and named and fixed in place, but one day that would not be the case. One day only his name would remain, on a tombstone or etched onto an urn, marking his dried bones or ashes.

The way he saw it, living taught you that you didn't have to live the way you'd been taught to live. You came from one place but more important was where you decided to go.

I was one of them on the dance floor and they were one of me. I jostled, was jostled in turn, collision as communication: I am here, we're here together. The bass bounced my shirt on my chest.

At first, it didn't sound like Carney. But then, Big Mike had tended his crop of grudges like a farmer, inspecting the rows, taking care they got enough water and fertilizer so that they grew big and healthy.

Make the letters blockier, so you can see it, put some red in there. He read an article that said red was a color favored by nature to make animals take notice, and you had to be part animal to live in New York City. Made sense to use red in signs, Pepper thought. But no one was asking him.

The owner of the plant store dipped her fingers into the soil of a pot earmarked for a city plant, one hearty in the way the shop's customers were hearty, for wasn't every citizen on the Grand Island a sort of sturdy indoor variety that didn't need much sunlight.

Where the goblin world and its assaults were banished and there was nothing but possibility

I had a roll of non sequiturs in my pockets and I was just tossing them out across the water trying to get a good skip going.

That's that. I'm not saying that anything nefarious happened, only saying what happened." He gestured for a refill. "One thing I've learned in my job is that life is cheap, and when things start getting expensive, it gets cheaper still.

It was where we mingled with who we had been and who we would be. Sharing space with our echoes out in the sun.

Twenty years is a while. They were both older, fatter, and sadder--which is the general trajectory--and that was a nice couple of days.

Anyone can start a religion. They just need the need of others.

What would he say? All the junkie shit going down these days, he opted to blame it on the drug trade. Some druggie punched him in the face, yelling something, kept going, didn't even try to take his wallet. Someone should do something about all these pushers. An enactment of how decent people felt these days: things are off-kilter, the world is overtaken by shadow.

Chester Miller was in his late fifties, slim-built except for his belly, which perched on his belt like an egg. A little sleepy.

She flickered then, as Ruby had that morning, and he saw her as she was on that rainy afternoon under his umbrella: almond-shaped dark eyes under long lashes, delicate in her pink cardigan, edges of her mouth upturned at one of her strange jokes. Unaware of the effect she had on people. On him, all these years later.

it was time to get out of what Coach called small-stack mentality. I no longer had to play like I was trying to escape the space station before it self-destructed, as the chirpy computer voice counted down.

Every Tuesday, James Fulton (and later, Orville Lever) stood in the downstairs drawing room and lectured on the intricacies of his science. Lectured on the implications of European maintenance deviations on Intuitionism, expounded on the gloom of the shaft and how it does not merely echo the gloom inside every living creature, but duplicates it perfectly. Afterwards there were mint juleps for everyone . . .

Who knew the havoc and ruin they'd perpetrate if allowed to run free among decent people. Best to keep them all in here, on this island, bought for twenty-seven bucks from the Indians, the story went. Twenty-seven bucks went a lot further in those days.

A slow hour passed, distracted by intermittent drops of moisture from above, as if the sky were conducting a feasibility study on the implications of rain. Of committing to a course of action.

Hope is a gateway drug, don't do it.

Numbers can't be racist, right? But the data can be dumb or wrong, though, and if you feed shit into the computer, it gives you shit right back.

HOLLYWOODING: Using all your years of deceiving others to put on a show at the table. Ever said, "Cute baby," about some newborn who'd found a portal between their Hell Dimension and our world? You may have a career in poker.