The Declaration of Independence is that sacred American text so full of meaning and purpose and yet quite empty if you examine it and pull it apart b…

- Colson Whitehead

A society manufactures the heroes it requires.

- Colson Whitehead

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 until the…

- Colson Whitehead

The thing I love about New York is getting lost but not worrying, just wandering and wandering, knowing that there's always a subway only ten blocks …

- Colson Whitehead

Memory is the most malicious cutter of all, preserving, recasting, panning in slow motion across the awful bits so that we retain every detail.

- Colson Whitehead

We never see other people anyway, only the monsters we make of them.

- Colson Whitehead

What isn't said is as important as what is said.

- Colson Whitehead

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 weapons, an idea or imp…

- Colson Whitehead

You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.

- Colson Whitehead