Quotes from Colson Whitehead

The way he saw it, living taught you that you didn't have to live the way you'd been taught to live. You came from one place but more important was where you decided to go.

At a certain point he learned the smarter play was to avoid the things that brought you low.

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

my father liked his Indian talk about the Great Spirit, Ridgeway said. All these years late, I prefer the American spirit, the one that called us from the Old World to the New, to conquer and build and civilize. And destroy that what needs to be destroyed. To lift up the lesser races. If not lift up, subjugate. And if not subjugate, exterminate. One destiny by divine perscription--the American imperative.

That is how the European tribes operate, she said, If they can't control it, they destroy it.

That's how the European tribes operate, she said. If they can't control it, they destroy it.

Alma used the word settled the way less genteel people used motherfucker, as a chisel to pry open a particular feeling.

in the slow motion that is the speed of humiliation.

She said that white towns had simply banded together to rid themselves of the black stronghold in their midst. That is how the European tribes operate, she said. If they can't control it, they destroy it. If

One day a pickaninny was happy and the next the light was gone from them; in between they had been introduced to a new reality of bondage.

Here's one delusion: that we can escape slavery. We can't. Its scars will never fade.

One of my dinner companions invited me on a strip-club excursion. I demurred, spoiled by the erotic revues of Anhedonia, where the performers remain fully clothed but get emotionally naked, delivering monologues about their top-shelf disappointments, and times when they were almost happy. Hard to enjoy American-style strip clubs after that. Once you go bleak, you never go back.

It was crazy to run and crazy not to run. How could a boy look past the school's property line, see that free and living world beyond, and not contemplate a dash to freedom? To write one's own story for once. To forbid the thought of escape, even that slightest butterfly thought of escape, was to murder one's humanity

That he had outwitted Nickel because he got along and kept out of trouble. In fact he had been ruined. He was like one of those Negroes Dr. King spoke of in his letter from jail, so complacent and sleepy after years of oppression that they h ad adjusted to it and learned to sleep in it as their only bed.

How to undo slavery's injury to the mental faculties–so many freed men continued to be enslaved by the horrors they'd endured.

The negro's story may have started in this country with degradation, but triumph and prosperity would be his one day.

from one place but more important was where you decided to go.

You go on about reasons," Cora said. "Call things by other names as if it changes what they are. But that don't make them true.

Cora read the accounts of slaves who had been born in chains and learned their letters. Of Africans who had been stolen, torn from their homes and families, and described the miseries of their bondage and then their hair-raising escapes. She recognized their stories as her own. They were the stories as her own. They were the stories of all the colored people she had ever known, the stories of black people yet to be born, the foundations of their triumphs.

Spoiler: I didn't win the Main Event. You had suspicions, you say? For one thing, the subtitle of this book would be The Amazing Life-Affirming Story of an Unremarkable Jerk Who Won the World Series of Poker! instead of having the word Death in it. For another, do these sound like the words of a motherfucker who won a million goddamn dollars?

a small freedom was the worst punishment of all, presenting the bounty of true freedom into painful relief.

I prefer the American spirit, the one that called us from the Old World to the New, to conquer and build and civilize. And destroy that what needs to be destroyed. To lift up the lesser races. If not lift up, subjugate. And if not subjugate, exterminate. Our destiny by divine prescription – the American imperative.

As if these daily humiliations and sacrifices mean something, are tallied by the ones who keep the books. Tomorrow we pick up where we left off. Sleep tight. Sleep deep. Sleep the sleep of the successful because somehow you made it through the day without anyone finding out that you are a complete fraud.

The mere fact of Vegas, its necessity, was an indictment of our normal lives. If we needed this place--to transform into a high roller or a sexy swinger, to be someone else, a winner for once--then certainly the world beyond the desert was a small and mealy place indeed.