Quotes from Colson Whitehead

Why not remove his desk, bring in a treadmill, hang a carrot from the ceiling and stop all pretense already.

By his sights, the real movie started after the first one ended, in the impossible return to things before

Call things by other names as if it changes what they are. But that don't make them true.

Optimism skipped out on the rent a while back, but the cynic in the penthouse won't leave until led out by marshals.

since you're asking me shit that's none of your business—what happened to your eye? Your eye is all fucked up. You look like shit." "I got punched in the face," Carney said. "Oh, that happens to me all the time

She understood that the library would be empty if these scholars knew Fulton was colored. No one would have worshipped him, his books probably would never have been published at all, or would exist under a different name, the name of the plagiarizing white man Fulton had been fool enough to share his theories with.

Humiliation was his currency, but tonight Miss Laura had picked his pocket.

He heard the sound of teeth splintering.

Sleep the sleep of the successful because somehow you made it through the day without anyone finding out that you are a complete fraud.

Crooks and civilians need to congregate every once in a while to reinforce their life decisions.

Understanding that something is always lost when it comes to human beings.

It's pronounced Wike, but yeah. They've been players in this city since back in the day. You're talking some stone-cold original Dutch motherfuckers. As in, charging the Lenape Indians rent on their own land type shit.

Most people say, "Show, don't tell," but I stand by Show and Tell, because when writers put their work out into the world, they're like kids bringing their broken unicorns and chewed-up teddy bears into class in the sad hope that someone else will love them as much as they do.

It's not so different up there, Lila Mae. They have the same white people up there they got down here. It might look different. It might feel different. But it's the same.

The Uncle Tom, the grinning nigger, the house nigger who is to blame for her debased place in this world. Pompey gave them a blueprint for colored folk. How they acted. How they pleased white folks. How eager they would be for a piece of the dream that they would do anything for massa.

Sitcom white folk, movie-of-the-week white folk were our coon show.

The most frightening proposition was that he had no connection to this place, that this fourth-floor office was simply where be broke down. If his presence here was random, then why not an entire world governed by randomness, with all that implied? Solve the Straggler, and you took a nibble out of the pure chaos the world had become.

There was no hope for him as a colored man because the white world will not let a colored man rise, and there was no hope for him as a white man because it was a lie.

Like the best storms, rush hour starts out as a slight drizzle, then becomes unholy deluge.

He possessed a strange facility for the mandatory.

Carney spied a patrolman across the street, drinking a Coca-Cola through a straw with bovine serenity. For a moment, he entertained the ridiculous proposition of a Negro calling a cop to complain he was being threatened by two white men.

Even angels are animals.

Weary and a little desperate, but also high-hearted. He turned off the lights.

Let one colored in and you're integrated. Let two in, you got a race war as they try to kiss up to whitey.