Sag Harbor Quotes

“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.”
― Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor

“Two people, two hands, and two songs, in this case "Big Shot" and "Bette Davis Eyes." The lyrics of the two songs provided no commentary, honest or ironic, on the proceedings. They were merely there and always underfoot, the insistent gray muck that was pop culture. It stuck to our shoes and we tracked it through our lives.”
― Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor

“The only time "early bloomer" has ever been applied to me is vis-a-vis my premature apprehension of the deep dread-of-existence thing. In all other cases, I plod and tromp along. My knuckles? Well dragged.”
― Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor

“The I-Remember-Whensters lumbered in with their musty catalogues of the bygone, dragging IVs of distilled nostalgia behind them on creaky wheels,”
― Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor

“in the slow motion that is the speed of humiliation.”
― Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor

“I was nostalgic for everything big and small. Nostalgic for what never happened and nostalgic about what will be, looking forward to looking back on a time when things got easier.”
― Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor

“Sitcom white folk, movie-of-the-week white folk were our coon show.”
― Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor

“It was where we mingled with who we had been and who we would be. Sharing space with our echoes out in the sun.”
― Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor

“I had a roll of non sequiturs in my pockets and I was just tossing them out across the water trying to get a good skip going.”
― Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor

“If the correct things belonged to you, perhaps you might belong.”
― Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor

“memory has a palette and broad brush.”
― Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor

“A firefly blinked into existence, drew half a word in the air. Then gone. A black bug secret in the night. Such a strange little guy. It materialized, visible to human eyes for brief moments, and then it disappeared. But it got its name from its fake time, people time, when in fact most of its business went on when people couldn't see it. Its true life was invisible to us but we called it firefly after its fractions. Knowable and fixed for a few seconds, sharing a short segment of its message before it continued on its real mission, unknowable in its true self and course, outside of reach. It was a bad name because it was incomplete—both parts were true, the bright and the dark, the one we could see and the other one we couldn't. It was both. I”
― Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor

“All over the world the teenage millions searched for routes out of their dank, personal labyrinths. Signing up for that perfect extracurricular, rehearsing fake smiles before toothpaste-flecked mirrors, rummaging through their personalities to come up with laid-back greetings and clever put-downs to be saved for that special occasion. Lying sprawled on their beds, ankles crossed, while they overanalyzed the lyric sheet of the band that currently owned their soul, until the words became a philosophy.”
― Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor

“it trains the kid in question to determine when people in the corner of his eye are talking about him and when they are not, a useful skill in later life when sorting out bona-fide persecution from perceived persecution, the this-is-actually-happening from the mere paranoid manifestation”
― Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor

“Rap was a natural resource, might as well pay for sunlight or the very breeze or an early-morning car alarm going off. No, I spent my money on music for moping. Perfect for drifting off on the divan with a damp towel on your forehead, a minor-chord soundtrack as you moaned into reflecting pools about your elaborate miserableness. The singers were faint, androgynous ghosts, dragging their too-heavy chains across the plains of misery, the gloomy moors of discontent, in search of relief. Let's just put it out there: I liked the Smiths.”
― Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor

“The french-fry smell was almost another person in our room, stumbling around in the dark,”
― Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor

“I was one of them on the dance floor and they were one of me. I jostled, was jostled in turn, collision as communication: I am here, we're here together. The bass bounced my shirt on my chest.”
― Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor

“Sometimes when you had your head down in the [ice cream] vats, time stopped. The swirling white mist stalled in the air, hanging like ribbons. All sound dropped out, the whirring of the blender and the radio, and even the static-y buzz of your own thoughts. I don't know where I went during these spells. They only lasted a few moments yet they contained a little scoop of the infinite, a waffle-perfumed eternity.”
― Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor

“I thought, This is where the day curdles.”
― Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor

“We were a made-for-TV family. Every new channel added to our lineup, every magnificent home-entertainment advance increased the possibility that we wouldn't have to talk to one another.”
― Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor

“Saturdays in Sag Harbor, I liked to lie in bed listening to the weekend rev itself up.”
― Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor

“Sometimes he tried to get a basketball game together, two-on-two, but after a while we just started playing three against him, and he still won, leaving us a sorry sight at the side of the court, bent over and dizzy, palms on our knees and reaching for imaginary asthma inhalers. Imaginary asthma inhalers created a placebo effect, which was better than nothing.”
― Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor

“Some kids rebelled to get attention. I did stupid things very carefully, spending all of my time thinking of ways to engineer small stupid things without getting caught. Things so small that no one else could see them and only I knew about them. But there I was last night, being stupid in a group, and of course that broke my rules and look where it got me.”
― Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor

“Dibs was dibs, we didn't have to call it. Ever since we were born, we'd lived according to the rough frontier justice of even Stephen, and even Stephen had a perfect memory.”
― Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor

“With that, the argument ended, the latest meaningless border skirmish in the long war over what white culture was acceptable and what was not.”
― Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor

“According to the world, we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses. A paradox to the outside, but it never occurred to us that there was anything strange about it. It was simply who we were.”
― Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor

“...we got sanded. In the towels, scalps, clumping on sweat along our limbs. It had begun, the gritification of the day.”
― Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor

“Three months, I thought. In idle moments, I retreated into that early-summer dream of reinvention, when you set your eyes on September and that refurbished self you were going to tool around in, honking the horn so people would take notice...”
― Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor

“Me...squinting in discomfort at the discovery of some new defect in the design of the world.”
― Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor