412 Quotes by Colson Whitehead

Sometimes such an experience bound one person to another; just as often the shame of one’s powerlessness made all witnesses into enemies.

Love and that love will be returned, trust in the righteous path and it will lead you to deliverance, fight and things will change.

Then it comes, always – the overseer’s cry, the call to work, the shadow of the master, the reminder that she is only a human being for a tiny moment across the eternity of her servitude. The.

She has always considered herself an atheist, not realizing she had a religion.

Royal joined the singing to change the subject and to remind her that there were things a body could feel good about. A community that had come together, from seeding to harvest to the bee. But the song was a work song Cora knew from the cotton rows, drawing her back to the Randall cruelties and making her heart thud. Connelly used to start the song as a signal to go back to picking after a whipping. how could such a bitter thing become a means of pleasure?

People get rid of plenty when they move – sometimes they’re changing not just places but personalities.

If I have three ideas and I’m working on one more than the others, that sort of tells me that I should work on that one.

How to undo slavery’s injury to the mental faculties–so many freed men continued to be enslaved by the horrors they’d endured.

If you were a thing – a cart or a horse or a slave – your value determined your possibilities.