Colson Whitehead Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings by Colson Whitehead
Colson Whitehead Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Colson Whitehead on Wise Famous Quotes.
They were up past dawn, crashed, were granted absolution in its secular manifestation of late checkout.
Sometimes such an experience bound one person to another; just as often the shame of one's powerlessness made all witnesses into enemies.
Truth was a changing display in a shop window, manipulated by hands when you weren't looking, alluring and ever out of reach.
Optimism skipped out on the rent a while back, but the cynic in the penthouse won't leave until led out by marshals.
And for the second time that day he blesses the certainty of airports because he can always turn around and go someplace else.
Cherish your old apartments and pause for a moment when you pass them. Pay tribute, for they are the caretakers for your reinventions.
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?
The negro's story may have started in this country with degradation, but triumph and prosperity would be his one day.
By making a circle of themselves that separated the human spirits within from the degradation without. Noble
She wondered where he escaped from, how bad it was, and how far he traveled before he put it behind him.
There will be no redemption because the men who run this place do not want redemption. They want to be as near to hell as they can.
Stolen bodies working stolen land. It was an engine that did not stop, its hungry boiler fed with blood.
In her Georgia misery she had pictured freedom, and it had not looked like this. Freedom was a community laboring for something lovely and rare. Mingo
The world is mean from the start and gets meaner every day. It uses you up until you only dream of death. Mabel
of a runaway? 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
Memory is the most malicious cutter of all, preserving, recasting, panning in slow motion across the awful bits so that we retain every detail.
A plantation was a plantation; one might think one's misfortunes distinct, but the true horror lay in their universality.
The I-Remember-Whensters lumbered in with their musty catalogues of the bygone, dragging IVs of distilled nostalgia behind them on creaky wheels,
It is failure that guides evolution; perfection provides no incentive for improvement, and nothing is perfect.
'Sag Harbor' was a very different book for me. It changed the way I thought about books that I wanted to do.
But who can resist the seductions of elevators these days, those stepping stones to Heaven, which make relentless verticality so alluring?
This city is reward for all it will enable you to achieve and punishment for all the crimes it will force you to commit.
She wasn't surprised when his character revealed itself - if you waited long enough, it always did. Like the dawn.
New York City in life was much like New York City in death. It was still hard to get a cab, for example.
Why not remove his desk, bring in a treadmill, hang a carrot from the ceiling and stop all pretense already.
In the dank utility room deep in the subbasements of my personality, a little man wiped his hands on his overalls and pulled the switch: More.
Poetry and prayer put ideas in people's heads that got them killed, distracting them from the ruthless mechanism of the world.
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.
She gulped the air like water, the night sky the best meal she had ever had, the starts made succulent and ripe after her time below.
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.
Poems were too close to prayer, rousing regrettable passions. Waiting for God to rescue you when it was up to you.
Craftsmen and artisans created items that were brittle rumors compared with his father's iron facts.
At ninety, everything is air and the difference between you and the medium of your passage is disintegrating with every increment of the ascension.
Their lives had been an interminable loop of repeated gestures; now their existences were winnowed to this discrete and eternal moment.
Somewhere, years ago, she had stepped off the path of life and could no longer find her way back to the family of people.