Quotes from Colson Whitehead

Mark Spitz backed away from the fucking corn.

His disdain for those he robbed was of a different variety, akin to that of a child grinding his shoe on a cockroach.

The traffic was atrocious and shaming, of that pantheon of traffic encountered when one is late to a wedding or other monumental event of fleeting import. Surely an accident unraveled its miserable inevitabilities ahead and now all was fouled, decelerated, the vehicles syllables in an incantation of misfortune.

Some days Carney felt the need to press his cousin on a lie until it broke and some days his love was such that the slightest quiver of mistrust made him ashamed.

Be kind to everybody. Make art. Fight the power.

He hovered on unexceptionality.

The future? The future was the clay in their hands.

The light at this hour, on this street, is the secondhand gray of ghetto twilight, a dull mercury color.

A piece of art really works when you see yourself in the main characters and you see a glimpse of yourself in the villains

The black city and the white city: overlapping, ignorant of each other, separate and connected by tracks.

Since when do white people care about reason? They gonna put that cop in jail? The bartender looked up from his racing form. Put a white cop in jail for killing a black boy? Believe in the fucking tooth fairy. Buford knows what's up, Pepper said. Newspapers talking about 'looting,' Buford continued. Should ask the Indians about looting. This whole country's founded on taking other people's shit. How'd they fill their museums? Tutankhamun.

That they ride in a box on a rope in a pit. That they are in the void.

This elevator's vibrations are resolving themselves in her mind as an aqua-blue cone.

Judge not the dysfunctions of others, let ye be judged.

Stay on the path and you'll be safe, eat in peace, sleep in peace, breathe in peace; stray and beware. Work together and we can subvert their evil order. It was a map of the black nation inside the white world, part of the bigger thing but its own self, independent, with its own constitution. If we didn't help one another we'd be lost out there.

The plague touched them all, blood contact or no. The secret murderers, dormant rapists, and latent fascists were now free to express their ruthless natures. The congenitally timid, those who had been stingy with their dreams for themselves, those who came out of the womb scared and remained so: These, too, found a final stage for their weakness and in their last breaths were fulfilled. I've always been like this. Now I'm more me.

Johnny Dandy starring Blake Headley and Patricia De Hammond had been running on Broadway at the Divinity Theater since Memorial Day weekend. Critics had meted their blows and yet. The dialogue and action were so shrouded in euphemism, so opaque in meaning and intention, alternately dull and

Launderer, heal thyself.

He was a rube, but he was no tourist.

There was a message there, if he could teach himself the language.

Hard to believe that reconstruction had progressed so far that clock-watching had returned, the slacker's code, the concept of weekend.

Lesson: If you're going to view blinds as taxes, be a Republican about them.

Someone helps you out by accident, it's still help.

Do we judge a man by the weight of the envelope-or whom he gives it to?