Quotes from Colson Whitehead

I'd never been much of an athlete, due to a physical condition I'd had since birth (unathleticism). Perhaps if there were a sport centered around lying on your couch in a neurotic stupor all day, I'd take an interest.

see chains on another person and be glad they are not your own--such was the good fortune permitted colored people, defined by how much worse it could be at any moment.

He had met this sort of white man before, earnest and believing what came out of their mouths. The veracity of their words was another matter, but at least they believed them. The southern white man was spat from the loins of the devil and there was no way to forecast his next evil act.

I'm what the botanists call a hybrid, he said the first time Cora heard him speak, A mixture of two different families. In flowers, such a concoction pleases the eye. When that amalgamation takes its shape in flesh and blood, some take great offence. In this room we recognize it for what it is - a new beauty come into the world, and it is in bloom all around us.

The Declaration [of Independence] is like a map. You trust that it's right but you only know by going out and testing it yourself.

He ate every miserable spoonful and ever since it struck him that adults are always trying to buy off children to make them forget their bad actions.

On one end there was who you were before you went underground, and on the other end a new person steps out into the light.

Plantation justice was mean and constant but the world was indiscriminate. Out in the world, the wicked escaped comeuppance and the decent stood in their stead at the whipping tree. Tennessee's disasters were the fruit of indifferent nature, without connection to the crimes of the homesteaders. To how the Cherokee had lived their lives.

Cherish your old apartments and pause for a moment when you pass them. Pay tribute, for they are the caretakers for your reinventions.

The land she tilled and worked had been Indian land. She knew the white men bragged about the efficiency of the massacres, where they killed women and babies, and strangled their futures in the crib. Stolen babies working stolen land. It was an engine that did not stop, its hungry boiler fed with blood.

In America the quirk was that people were things. Best to cut your losses on an old man who won't survive a trip across the ocean. A young buck from strong tribal stock got customers into a froth. A slave girl squeezing out pups was like a mint, money that bred money. If you were a thing—a cart or a horse or a slave—your value determined your possibilities.

Weeks passed, but my Word-A-Day Calendar was stuck on motherfucker.

People wore different kinds of chains across their lifetimes, but it wasn't hard to interpret rebellion, even when the rebels wore costumes to deny blame.

The I-Remember-Whensters lumbered in with their musty catalogues of the bygone, dragging IVs of distilled nostalgia behind them on creaky wheels

The only currency to satisfy the debt was their survival and to help others when circumstances permitted.

But who can resist the seductions of elevators these days, those stepping stones to Heaven, which make relentless verticality so alluring?

But it's like riding a bike. A hell-bike, made out of hell.

They jostled one another, competed for space below as they did above, in a minuet of ruin and triumph. In the subway, down in the dark, no citizen was more significant or more decrepit than another. All were smeared into a common average of existence, the A's and the C's tumbling or rising to settle into a ruthless mediocrity. No escape.

Their lives had been an interminable loop of repeated gestures; now their existences were winnowed to this discrete and eternal moment.

Hard work was a fundamental virtue, for hard work didn't allow time for marches or sit-ins. Elwood would not make a commotion of himself by messing with that movie-theater nonsense, she said. "You have made an agreement with Mr. Marconi to work in his store after school. If your boss can't depend on you, you won't be able to keep a job." Duty might protect him, as it had protected her.

How's that training coming along, Griff? Good old Max says you're a natural. Turner frowned. Any time a white man asked you about yourself, they were about to fuck you over.

She was a stray after all. A stray not only in its plantation meaning-orphaned, with no one to look after her-but in every other sphere as well. Somewhere, years ago, she had stepped off the path of life and could no longer find her way back to the family of people.

It was the softest bed she had ever lain in. But then, it was the only bed she had ever lain in.

What had started it, the mess this week? A white cop shot an unarmed black boy three times and killed him. Good old American know-how on display: We do marvels, we do injustice, and our hands were always busy.