412 Quotes by Colson Whitehead

The championship would be their sole acquaintance with justice at Nickel.

Well, imagine you are alone in a room... Are you the best, most special person in the room right now? Yes. That’s the gift of being alone.

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.

Throw us in jail, and we will still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and, as difficult as it is, we will still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities after midnight hours, and drag us out onto some wayside road, and beat us and leave us half-dead, and we will still love you. But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom.

Poems were too close to prayer, rousing regrettable passions. Waiting for God to rescue you when it was up to you. Poetry and prayer put ideas in people’s heads that got them killed, distracting them from the ruthless mechanism of the world.

The world may be mean, but people don’t have to be, not if they refuse.

One of my dinner companions invited me on a strip-club excursion. I demurred, spoiled by the erotic revues of Anhedonia, where the performers remain fully clothed but get emotionally naked, delivering monologues about their top-shelf disappointments, and times when they were almost happy. Hard to enjoy American-style strip clubs after that. Once you go bleak, you never go back.

Roger Tipple did not have a weak chin so much as a very aggressive neck.