Quotes from Colson Whitehead

As I get older and write more books I'm definitely allowing the humorous side of my personality more rein in my work.

If I have three ideas and I'm working on one more than the others, that sort of tells me that I should work on that one.

The Declaration of Independence is that sacred American text so full of meaning and purpose and yet quite empty if you examine it and pull it apart because the words 'All Men' exclude a vast number of citizens.

No matter how long you have been here, you are a New Yorker the first time you say, That used to be Munsey's, or That used to be the Tic Toc Lounge…. You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.

And America, too, is a delusion, the grandest one of all. The white race believes--believes with all its heart--that it is their right to take the land. To kill Indians. Make war. Enslave their brothers. This nation shouldn't exist, if there is any justice in the world, for its foundations are murder, theft, and cruelty. Yet here we are.

We never see other people anyway, only the monsters we make of them.

Slavery is a sin when whites were put to the yoke, but not the African. All men are created equal, unless we decide you are not a man.

The world may be mean, but people don't have to be, not if they refuse.

We must believe in our souls that we are somebody, that we are significant, that we are worthful, and we must walk the streets of life every day with this sense of dignity and this sense of somebody-ness.

Stolen bodies working stolen land. It was an engine that did not stop, its hungry boiler fed with blood.

Cora didn't know what optimistic meant. She asked the other girls that night if they were familiar with the word. None of them had heard it before. She decided that it meant trying.

A monster is a person who has stopped pretending.

You can change the law but you can't change people and how they treat each other.

Sometimes a useful delusion is better than a useless truth.

The whites came to this land for a fresh start and to escape the tyranny of their masters, just as the freemen had fled theirs. But the ideals they held up for themselves, they denied others.

Q: Why write about slavery? Haven't we had enough stories about slavery? Why do we need another one? A: I could have written about upper middle class white people who feel sad sometimes, but there's a lot of competition.

Truth was a changing display in a shop window, manipulated by hands when you weren't looking, alluring and ever out of reach.

If everyone looked the other way, then everybody was in on it. If he looked the other way, he was as implicated as the rest. That's how he saw it, how he'd always seen things.

The only way to know how long you are lost in the darkness is to be saved from it.

If it is true for you, it is true for someone else, and you are no longer alone.

If you want to see what this nation is all about, you have to ride the rails. Look outside as you speed through, and you'll find the true face of America. It was a joke, then, from the start. There was only darkness outside the windows on her journeys, and only ever would be darkness.

It is failure that guides evolution; perfection provides no incentive for improvement, and nothing is perfect.

The boys could have been many things had they not been ruined by that place. Doctors who cured diseases or perform brain surgery, inventing shit that saves lives. Run for president. All those lost geniuses - sure not all of them were geniuses, Chickie Pete for example was not solving special relativity - but they had been denied even the simple pleasure of being ordinary. Hobbled and handicapped before the race even began, never figuring out how to be normal.

Make a career of humanity. Make it a central part of your life.