Quotes from Colson Whitehead

justice may be slow and invisible, but it always renders its true verdict in the end.

Perhaps Nickel was the very afterlife that awaited him, with a White House down the hill and an eternity of oatmeal and an infinite brotherhood of broken boys.

It was the day after Sam's house collapsed, though she couldn't be sure. Best to measure time now with one of the Randall plantation's cotton scales, her hunger and fear piling on one side while her hopes were removed from the other in increments. The only way to know how long you are lost in the darkness is to be saved from it.

Freedom was a thing that shifted as you looked at it, the way a forest is dense with trees up close but from outside, from the empty meadow, you see its true limits.

Take it out on each other if you cannot take it out on the ones who deserve it.

The Four Questions?" "As put forth by Mettleheim: How did this happen? How could this happen? Is it exceptional? How will it be avoided in the future?

and for the second time that day he blesses the certainty of airports because he can always turn around and go someplace else.

We Anhedonians have adapted to long periods between good news. Our national animal is the hope camel. We have no national bird. All the birds are dead.

She wondered why there were only two kinds of weather: hardship in the morning, and tribulation at night.

In death the negro became a human being. Only then was he the white man's equal.

Somewhere, years ago, she had stepped off the path of life and could no longer find her way back to the family of people.

They will have to destroy this city once we deliver the black box. The current bones will not accommodate the marrow of the device. They will have to raze the city and cart off the rubble to less popular boroughs and start anew.

Men start off good and then the world makes them mean. The world is mean from the start and gets meaner every day.

At ninety, everything is air and the difference between you and the medium of your passage is disintegrating with every increment of the ascension.

It was a glorious June morning. The sun was shining, the birds were singing, the ambulances were screaming, and the daylight falling on last night's crime scenes made the blood twinkle like dew in a green heaven.

Crossing a single street transformed the way people talked, determined the size and condition of the homes, the dimension and character of the dreams.

What else was an ongoing criminal enterprise complicated by periodic violence for, but to make your wife happy?

Resentment was the hinge of her personality.

She watches the people through the sooted panes. They walk slower than they do when she reports to work and when she leaves work, and differently still from weekend strolling. They are the tin men and rag dolls who wake after hours in the toy store.

At intersections and crowded areas between sedans and trucks the gutter reflected the bitter pastels of metropolitan neon, rainbows hacked down to earth and dirt.

Sometimes such an experience bound one person to another; just as often the shame of one's powerlessness made all witnesses into enemies.

No, Fulton was colored. She understands this luminous truth. Natchez did not lie about that: she has seen it in the man's books, made plain by her new literacy. In the last few days she has learned how to read, like a slave does, one forbidden word at a time.

Elwood said, It's against the law. State law, but also Elwood's. 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.

It was not enough to survive, you have to live—