Colson Whitehead Quotes

New York City does not hold our former selves against us. Perhaps we can extend the same courtesy.

I do not agree with Thomas Wolfe... about anything. You can go home again as long as you don't expect home to be what it was when you left it. Or you don't expect yourself to be what you were when you left home.

My New York, the one I identify with as a kid, has greatly changed. And I'm sure the people who were adults when I was a kid probably felt the same way.

For those who pass it without entering, the city is one thing; it is another for those who are trapped by it and never leave. There is the city where you arrive for the first time; and there is another city which you leave never to return. Each deserves a different name; perhaps I have already spoken of Irene under other names; perhaps I have spoken only of Irene.

I didn't have to do that much research to present a post-apocalyptic New York because I basically grew up in that New York. That old New York is gone, and that's one thing that's undiscoverable now but I explore in my fiction.

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

San Francisco isn't what it used to be, and it never was.

Nothing lasts. So it's my belief, yes, I know a lot of the things that we liked didn't last, but maybe things we don't like, they're also not going to last. There has been progress in my lifetime. There are certainly things that are better than when I was young, and there are things that are worse. New York City, it's worse. There's no question.

Somewhere inside me there’ll always be the person I am to-night

I think you get to a certain point in your life and where you grew up stops reminding you of when you grew up. Everything changes, everything metamorphosizes.

The experts or the cynics say, "Oh, those were the good old days, that's when drivers were really drivers. They didn't have all these aids." You know what? What we had, we did the best with and when we got more we provided what was needed.

We have inhabited both the actual and the imaginary realms for a long time. But we don't live in either place the way our parents or ancestors did. Enchantment alters with age, and with the age. We know a dozen Arthurs now, all of them true. The Shire changed irrevocably even in Bilbo's lifetime. Don Quixote went riding out to Argentina and met Jorge Luis Borges there. Plus c'est la même chose, plus ça change.

I've been a foreigner for the past twenty years. I don't have roots anymore. My roots are in my memory and my writing. That's why memory is so important. Who are you but what you can remember?

You really can't go home again. Sometimes, that's a good thing. Sometimes, when you try, you find out that home isn't really there anymore... but that it wasn't only in your head before. Home actually existed. Home wasn't just a dream. Sometimes, that's the best thing of all.

I think it's just getting comfortable in New York City, comfortable in your own skin.

The condition of being forgiven is self-abandonment. The proud man prefers self-reproach, however painful --because the reproached self isn't abandoned; it remains intact.

Do you remember how you felt at seventeen? I do and I don't (...) Imagine you came from outer space and someone showed you a butterfly and a caterpillar. Would you ever put the two of them together? That's me and my memories.

Poets claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years.

Men... look back on the children who were once themselves, and attempt to reconstruct them. But they can no longer think like the child.

I have had to give up so much, so many selves and lives already. I have grown up and out of the rubble of my old lives, of things and people I have cared for.

Forget the suffering You caused others. Forget the suffering Others caused you. The waters run and run, Springs sparkle and are done, You walk the earth you are forgetting. Sometimes you hear a distant refrain. What does it mean, you ask, who is singing? A childlike sun grows warm. A grandson and a great-grandson are born. You are led by the hand once again. The names of the rivers remain with you. How endless those rivers seem! Your fields lie fallow, The city towers are not as they were. You stand at the threshold mute.

After they remodeled Yankee Stadium I didn't feel that the ghosts were there anymore. It just wasn't the same.

There are many kinds of loss embedded in a loss - the loss of the person, and the loss of the self you got to be with that person. And the seeming loss of the past, which now feels forever out of reach.

If I were to start taking care of my grooming, I would no longer be my own self.

So sad! This is the saddest part when you lose someone you love- that person keeps changing. And later you wonder, Is this the same person I lost?