Colson Whitehead

We never see other people anyway, only the monsters we make of them.

A monster is a person who has stopped pretending.

And America, too, 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.

Slavery is a sin when whites were put to the yoke, but not the African. All men are created equal, unless we decide you are not a man.

Stolen bodies working stolen land. It was an engine that did not stop, its hungry boiler fed with blood.

It is failure that guides evolution; perfection provides no incentive for improvement, and nothing is perfect.

The whites came to this land for a fresh start and to escape the tyranny of their masters, just as the freemen had fled theirs. But the ideals they held up for themselves, they denied others.

A society manufactures the heroes it requires.

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