412 Quotes by Colson Whitehead

Cora didn’t know what optimistic meant. She asked the other girls that night if they were familiar with the word. None of them had heard it before. She decided that it meant trying.

How to get through the day if every indignity capsized you in a ditch?

Poetry and prayer put ideas in people’s heads that got them killed, distracting them from the ruthless mechanism of the world.

On one end there was who you were before you went underground, and on the other end a new person steps out into the light.

Two people, two hands, and two songs, in this case “Big Shot” and “Bette Davis Eyes.” The lyrics of the two songs provided no commentary, honest or ironic, on the proceedings. They were merely there and always underfoot, the insistent gray muck that was pop culture. It stuck to our shoes and we tracked it through our lives.

It occurred to her one night that she was one of the vengeful monsters they were scared of: She had killed a white boy. She might kill one of them next. And because of that fear, they erected a new scaffolding of oppression on the cruel foundation laid hundreds of years before.

All men are created equal, unless we decide you are not a man.

There are instruments and human players but sometimes a fiddle or a drum make instruments of those who play them, and all are put in servitude to the song.

Here’s one delusion: that we can escape slavery. We can’t. Its scars will never fade.