412 Quotes by Colson Whitehead

Somewhere, years ago, she had stepped off the path of life and could no longer find her way back to the family of people.

They will have to destroy this city once we deliver the black box. The current bones will not accommodate the marrow of the device. They will have to raze the city and cart off the rubble to less popular boroughs and start anew.

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

She watches the people through the sooted panes. They walk slower than they do when she reports to work and when she leaves work, and differently still from weekend strolling. They are the tin men and rag dolls who wake after hours in the toy store.

He who gets behind in a race must forever remain behind or run faster than the man in front.

At ninety, everything is air and the difference between you and the medium of your passage is disintegrating with every increment of the ascension.

He stopped hooking up with other people once he realized the first thing he did was calculate whether or not he could outrun them.

I’m what the botanists call a hybrid,” he said the first time Cora heard him speak, “A mixture of two different families. In flowers, such a concoction pleases the eye. When that amalgamation takes its shape in flesh and blood, some take great offence. In this room we recognize it for what it is – a new beauty come into the world, and it is in bloom all around us.

Like justice, it existed in theory.