The collection / 62 fragments

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Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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01c. 1969 AD

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

Colson Whitehead / quote

02c. 1969 AD

Maybe we become New Yorkers the day we realize that New York will go on without us.

Colson Whitehead / quote

03c. 1969 AD

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

Colson Whitehead / quote

04c. 1969 AD

Cherish your old apartments and pause for a moment when you pass them. Pay tribute, for they are the caretakers for your reinventions.

Colson Whitehead / quote

05c. 1969 AD

The city knows you better than any living person because it has seen you when you are alone.

Colson Whitehead / quote

06c. 1969 AD

As if these daily humiliations and sacrifices mean something, are tallied by the ones who keep the books. Tomorrow we pick up where we left off. Sleep tight. Sleep deep. Sleep the sleep of the successful because somehow you made it through the day without anyone finding out that you are a complete fraud.

Colson Whitehead / quote

07c. 1969 AD

I'm here because I was born here and thus ruined for anywhere else, but I don't know about you.

Colson Whitehead / quote

08c. 1969 AD

Why should anyone else have it easy. Spoken like a true New Yorker.

Colson Whitehead / quote

09c. 1969 AD

A society manufactures the heroes it requires.

Colson Whitehead / quote

10c. 1969 AD

New York City in life was much like New York City in death. It was still hard to get a cab, for example.

Colson Whitehead / quote

11c. 1969 AD

Mark Spitz had met plenty of the divine-retribution folks over the months. This was their moment; they were umbrella salesmen standing outside a subway entrance in a downpour. The human race deserved the plague, we brought it on ourselves for poisoning the planet, for the Death of God, the calculated brutalities of the global economic system, for driving primordial species to extinction: the entire collapse of values as evidenced by everything from nuclear fission to reality television to alternate side of the street parking. Mark Spitz could only endure these harangues for a minute or two before he split. It was boring.The plague was the plague. You were wearing galoshes, or you weren't.

Colson Whitehead / quote

12c. 1969 AD

A monster is a person who has stopped pretending.

Colson Whitehead / quote

13c. 1969 AD

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.

Colson Whitehead / quote

14c. 1969 AD

Nowdays, Rosie the Rivetere was a former soccer mom who had just opened her own catering business when Last Night came down and her husband and kids were eaten by a parking attendant at the local megamall’s discount- appliance emporium.

Colson Whitehead / quote