412 Quotes by Colson Whitehead

What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, because in the end, whatever goes down, whatever you get up to, your triumphs and transgressions, nobody actually understands what it means except for you.

In America the quirk was that people were things. Best to cut your losses on an old man who won’t survive a trip across the ocean. A young buck from strong tribal stock got customers into a froth. A slave girl squeezing out pups was like a mint, money that bred money. If you were a thing – a cart or a horse or a slave – your value determined your possibilities.

What did you get for that, for knowing the day you were born into the white man’s world? It didn’t seem like the thing.

The world is mean from the start and gets meaner every day. It uses you up until you only dream of death. Mabel.

Pick your fights like you pick your nose: with complete awareness of where you are.

One day a pickaninny was happy and the next the light was gone from them; in between they had been introduced to a new reality of bondage.

The almanac had a strange, soapy smell and made a cracking noise like fire as she turned the pages. She’d never been the first person to open a book.

Plantation justice was mean and constant but the world was indiscriminate. Out in the world, the wicked escaped comeuppance and the decent stood in their stead at the whipping tree. Tennessee’s disasters were the fruit of indifferent nature, without connection to the crimes of the homesteaders. To how the Cherokee had lived their lives.

Freedom was a thing that shifted as you looked at it, the way a forest is dense with the trees up close but from the outside, from the empty meadow, you see its true limits. Being free had nothing to do with chains or how much space you had. On the plantation, she was not free, but she moved unrestricted on its acres, tasting the air and tracing the summer stars. The place was big in its smallness. Here, she was free of her master but slunk around a warren so tiny she couldn’t stand.