412 Quotes by Colson Whitehead

During his term at Nickel, the Mexican boy sidestepped the squabbles that embroiled the rest of them, the uncounted disputes over psychological turf and endless encroachments. His constant dorm reassignments notwithstanding, Jaimie kept a quiet profile and conducted himself in accordance with the Nickel handbook’s rules of conduct – a miracle, since no one had ever seen the handbook despite its constant invocations by the staff. Like justice, it existed in theory.

Freedom was a community laboring for something lovely and rare.

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.

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.

Truth was a changing display in a shop window, manipulated by hands when you weren’t looking, alluring and ever out of reach.

He had nerve damage: input could not penetrate. The world stalled out at his edges. Sometimes he had trouble speaking to other people, rummaging for language, and it seemed to him that an invisible layer divided him from the rest of the world, a membrane of emotional surface tension.

What isn’t said is as important as what is said.

Since the night she was kidnapped she had been appraised and reappraised, each day waking upon the pan of a new scale. Know your value and you know your place in the order. To escape the boundary of the plantation was to escape the fundamental principles of your existence: impossible. It.

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.