Colson Whitehead > Quotes

“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.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

“We never see other people anyway, only the monsters we make of them.”
― Colson Whitehead, Zone One

“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.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

“The world may be mean, but people don't have to be, not if they refuse.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

“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.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys

“Stolen bodies working stolen land. It was an engine that did not stop, its hungry boiler fed with blood.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

“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.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

“A monster is a person who has stopped pretending.”
― Colson Whitehead

“You swallow hard when you discover that the old coffee shop is now a chain pharmacy, that the place where you first kissed so-and-so is now a discount electronics retailer, that where you bought this very jacket is now rubble behind a blue plywood fence and a future office building. Damage has been done to your city. You say, ''It happened overnight.'' But of course it didn't. Your pizza parlor, his shoeshine stand, her hat store: when they were here, we neglected them. For all you know, the place closed down moments after the last time you walked out the door. (Ten months ago? Six years? Fifteen? You can't remember, can you?) And there have been five stores in that spot before the travel agency. Five different neighborhoods coming and going between then and now, other people's other cities. Or 15, 25, 100 neighborhoods. Thousands of people pass that storefront every day, each one haunting the streets of his or her own New York, not one of them seeing the same thing.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Colossus of New York

“Sometimes a useful delusion is better than a useless truth.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

“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.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

“You can change the law but you can’t change people and how they treat each other.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys

“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.”
― Colson Whitehead

“Truth was a changing display in a shop window, manipulated by hands when you weren’t looking, alluring and ever out of reach.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

“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.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys

“The only way to know how long you are lost in the darkness is to be saved from it.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

“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.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

“If it is true for you, it is true for someone else, and you are no longer alone.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys

“It is failure that guides evolution; perfection provides no incentive for improvement, and nothing is perfect.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Intuitionist

“Make a career of humanity. Make it a central part of your life.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys

“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.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys

“Google “brooklyn writer” and you’ll get,Did you mean: the future of literature as we know it?”
― COLSON WHITEHEAD

“If niggers were supposed to have their freedom, they wouldn't be in chains. If the red man was supposed to keep hold of his land, it'd still be his. If the white man wasn't destined to take this new world, he wouldn't own it now.

Here was the true Great Spirit, the divine thread connecting all human endeavor--if you can keep it, it is yours. Your property, slave or continent. The American imperative.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

“A plantation was a plantation; one might think one’s misfortunes distinct, but the true horror lay in their universality.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

“She wasn’t surprised when his character revealed itself—if you waited long enough, it always did. Like the dawn.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

“Poetry and prayer put ideas in people’s heads that got them killed, distracting them from the ruthless mechanism of the world.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

“As time went on, we learned to arm ourselves in our different ways. Some of us with real guns, some of us with more ephemeral weapons, an idea or improbable plan or some sort of formulation about how best to move through the world. An idea that will let us be. Protect us and keep us safe. But a weapon nonetheless.”
― Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor

“Freedom was a community laboring for something lovely and rare.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

“Yet when his classmates put their blades to a colored cadaver, they did more for the cause of colored advancement than the most high-minded abolitionist. In death the negro became a human being. Only then was he the white man’s equal.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

“Like justice, it existed in theory.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys