Colson Whitehead Quotes

33 quotes in 626 categories

• We never see other people anyway, only the monsters we make of them.
• As time went on, we learned to arm ourselves in our different ways. Some of us with real guns, some of us with more ephemeral…
• A monster is a person who has stopped pretending.
• It is failure that guides evolution; perfection provides no incentive for improvement, and nothing is perfect.
• Pain could be killed. Sadness could not, but the drugs did shut its mouth for a time.
• A society manufactures the heroes it requires.
• Isn't it great when you're a kid and the world is full of anonymous things? Everything is bright and mysterious until you know what it…
• Best to let the broken glass be broken glass, let it splinter into smaller pieces and dust and scatter. Let the cracks between things widen…
• Colored, Negro, Afro-American, African American. ... Every couple of years someone came up with something that got us an inch closer to the truth. Bit…
• New York City in life was much like New York City in death. It was still hard to get a cab, for example.
• In keeping with my family's affection for doomed product lines and hexed formats, we purchased a Betamax. The year before, we'd bought a TRS-80 instead…
• It had been a humdrum couple of days, reaffirming his belief in reincarnation: everything was so boring that this could not be the first time…
• There will be no redemption because the men who run this place do not want redemption. They want to be as near to hell as…
• I can't blame modern technology for my predilection for distraction, not after all the hours I've spent watching lost balloons disappear into the clouds. I…
• Talking about New York is a way of talking about the world.
• To put off the inevitable, we try to fix the city in place, remember it as it was, doing to the city what we would…
• You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.
• Don’t go searching for a subject, let your subject find you. You can’t rush inspiration. … Once your subject finds you, it’s like falling in…
• Google "brooklyn writer" and you'll get, Did you mean: the future of literature as we know it?
• New York City does not hold our former selves against us. Perhaps we can extend the same courtesy.

Browse Colson Whitehead Quotes by Category