20 Quotes from The Underground Railroad book by Colson Whitehead

Hello. This post is a collection of 20 quotes from the book - The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. I hope you enjoy reading these quotes.

The Underground Railroad Quotes

White men eat you up, but sometimes colored folk eat you up, too.

Every slave thinks about it. In the morning and in the afternoon and in the night. Dreaming of it. Every dream a dream of escape even when it didn’t look like it.

If you want to see what this nation is all about, I always say, you have to ride the rails. Look outside as you speed through, and you’ll find the true face of America.

If you weren’t a little dirty at the end of the day, you weren’t much of a man.

If niggers were supposed to have their freedom, they wouldn’t be in chains. If the red man was supposed to keep hold of his land, it’d still be his. If the white man wasn’t destined to take this new world, he wouldn’t own it now. Here was the true Great Spirit, the divine thread connecting all human endeavor—if you can keep it, it is yours. Your property, slave or continent. The American imperative.

One might think one’s misfortunes distinct, but the true horror lay in their universality.

Truth was a changing display in a shop window, manipulated by hands when you weren’t looking, alluring and ever out of reach.

Freedom was a thing that shifted as you looked at it, the way a forest is dense with trees up close but from outside, from the empty meadow, you see its true limits.

A black boy has no future, free papers or no. Not in this country.

Money does that to a family sometimes. Brings out the impurities.

To see chains on another person and be glad they are not your own—such was the good fortune permitted colored people, defined by how much worse it could be any moment.

Who knows what destiny has in store for us, and what kind of people we will have the pleasure to know?

Poetry and prayer put ideas in people’s heads that got them killed, distracting them from the ruthless mechanism of the world.

A free black walks different than a slave. White people recognize it immediately, even if they don’t know it. Walks different, talks different, carries himself different. It’s in the bones.

The only thing more dangerous than a nigger with a gun, was a nigger with a book.

Justice may be slow and invisible, but it always renders its true verdict in the end.

Sometimes a useful delusion is better than a useless truth.

America, is a delusion, the grandest one of all. The white race believes—believes with all its heart—that it is their right to take the land. To kill Indians. Make war. Enslave their brothers. This nation shouldn’t exist, if there is any justice in the world, for its foundations are murder, theft, and cruelty. Yet here we are.

Women and animals, you only have to break them in once. They stay broke.

Men start off good and then the world makes them mean. The world is mean from the start and gets meaner every day. It uses you up until you only dream of death.