412 Quotes by Colson Whitehead

It is failure that guides evolution; perfection provides no incentive for improvement, and nothing is perfect.

We go solo, my kinfolk and I, taking each day as an IKEA bookcase we build alone, sans instructions. The leftover pieces? We gobble them down, and sometimes it's the only thing we eat all day.

What's wrong with Disneyland? It brings joy to millions and tutors children about the corporate, overbranded world they've been born into.

But in general the people who I think would be moved by art, moved to change legislation, don't read novels, don't read poems, and don't really care that someone's written a book about a place like Dozier.

Turner had never met a kid like Elwood before. Sturdy was the word he returned to, even though the Tallahassee boy looked soft, conducted himself like a goody-goody, and had an irritating tendency to preach. Wore eyeglasses you wanted to grind underfoot like a butterfly. He talked like a white college boy, read books when he didn't have to, and mined them for uranium to power his own personal A-bomb. Still--sturdy.

As it turned out, one aspect of my personality would help me in my odyssey: I was a bider. Temperamentally suited to hold out for good cards, well accustomed to waiting. 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.

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

I can't blame modern technology for my predilection for distraction, not after all the hours I've spent watching lost balloons disappear into the clouds. I did it before the Internet, and I'll do it after the apocalypse, assuming we still have helium and weak-gripped children.

We never see other people anyway, only the monsters we make of them.