"A monster is a person who has stopped pretending."
"Being a slave meant never having the stability of knowing your family would be together as many years as God designed it to be. It meant you could come back from picking cotton in a field to find that your children are gone, your husband's gone, your mother's gone. It meant knowing you are property that could be sold to the highest bidder, of value only to continue to support the plantation economy."
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Source: Source: www.oprah.com
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More quotes by 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 improbable plan or some sort of formulation about how best to move through the world. An idea that will let us be. Protect us and keep us safe. But a weapon nonetheless."
"It is failure that guides evolution; perfection provides no incentive for improvement, and nothing is perfect."
"You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now."
"Most people say, "Show, don't tell," but I stand by Show and Tell, because when writers put their work out into the world, they're like kids bringing their broken unicorns and chewed-up teddy bears into class in the sad hope that someone else will love them as much as they do."
"Memory is the most malicious cutter of all, preserving, recasting, panning in slow motion across the awful bits so that we retain every detail."