Quotes from Colson Whitehead

Raymond shared theirs—and the

Like the moon, you're only good and visible a few days a month. Exerting influence, pulling up whitecaps. The rest of time falling away, cut up into parts and nobody knows where you are.

There were hours when every last person on Earth thought they were the last person on Earth, and it was precisely this thought of final, irrevocable isolation that united them all.

a rusty machete and a bag of almonds makes you a person of substance?

Verticality is such a risky enterprise.

I can't help it if I understand that everything tends to ruin. Over our heads, Skylab is eternally falling down, I can see it all, the debris raining without cessation. I was a skinny guy, but I was morbidly obese with doom.

Alma used the word settled the way the less genteel used motherfucker, as a chisel to pry open a particular feeling.

The streets were shrinking, and she felt about the places they led to the same way she felt about her hair when she saw it on the bathroom floor after her mother cut it off.

I lit fires because I didn't know back then it was enough to see it in my head," Zippo said. "I didn't have to do it. That's why people dig my boudoir photographs. Seeing it can be the same thing as doing it.

I was a skinny guy, but I was morbidly obese with doom.

Adult trouble was more permanent than Aunt Millie smacking you with a hairbrush or his father taking off his belt.

From then on whenever he heard the song he thought of the death of Munson. They always said that when the old city disappeared and something new took its place.

Now he thought about the poor man and his last view of earth: the groove of rust worn from the tub's leaky faucet, like the ooze from a wound.

Whoever has the better stuff wins. Sound familiar, American lackeys of late-stage capitalism?

A force from above held him down, and a counterforce from below bore him aloft. He hovered on unexceptionality.

The Theresa desegregated in 1940, after the neighborhood tipped over from Jews and Italians and became the domain of Southern blacks and West Indians. Everyone who came uptown had crossed some variety of violent ocean.

That was a temporary setback," Zippo said. "If you call an opportunity to take stock and really think about how you can make your life better a 'setback.

It was a night in late August, a night that rekindled in rattling windows and tree branch palsy that lost recollection of autumn, misplaced for the succession of bright summer distractions, trapped heat in small rooms and sweaty underarms.

If two women were a flaw, what was a community?

Sandra knew how to handle herself, whether dealing with the kitchen staff or the impetuous attentions of customers. Dancing at the Apollo was a tutorial in the male animal, after all.

The man with the handlebar mustache had a scar that dug from his lip to the middle of his cheek, as if he'd wriggled free from a fisherman's hook.

Every state is different,' Lumbly was saying. 'Each one a state of possibility, with its own customs and way of doing things. Moving through them, you'll see the breadth of the country before you reach your final stop.

He upheld the misspelling in his thoughts, in keeping with his loyalty to his mistakes.

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.