Colson Quotes & Sayings

S. Lewis, coined the phrase "The — Charles W. Colson

Wilberforce and the band of abolitionists knew that a private faith that did not act in the face of oppression was no faith at all. — Charles Colson

I was a skinny guy, but I was morbidly obese with doom. — Colson Whitehead

Don't go searching for a subject, let your subject find you. You can't rush inspiration. ... Once your subject finds you, it's like falling in love. It will be your constant companion. Shadowing you, peeping in your windows, calling you at all hours to leave messages like, Only you understand me. — Colson Whitehead

Royal joined the singing to change the subject and to remind her that there were things a body could feel good about. A community that had come together, from seeding to harvest to the bee. But the song was a work song Cora knew from the cotton rows, drawing her back to the Randall cruelties and making her heart thud. Connelly used to start the song as a signal to go back to picking after a whipping. how could such a bitter thing become a means of pleasure? — Colson Whitehead

I always have a few ideas that are percolating, and then after I've finished a book and it's a year later, and things are sort of festering and things are disgusting in my house and I have to get back to work, whatever project I keep thinking about is the one I end up working on. Sort of a very simple process of elimination. — Colson Whitehead

This idea that it's intolerant to object to anyone else's position, hovever, is a complete perversion of the historic understanding of tolrance, which was that one had to have the respect to listen to anyone else's point of view, even one with which one might profoundly disagree. Tolerance did not reject truth claims; it respected them. — Charles W. Colson

Looking at them now as folks chased in and out, getting ready, it was hard for Cora to image a time when the fourteen cabins hadn't been there. For all the wear, the complaints from deep in the wood at every step, the cabins had the always-quality of the hills to the west, of the creek that bisected the property. The cabins radiated permanence and in turn summed timeless feelings in those who lived and died in them: envy and spite. If they'd left more space between the old cabins and the new cabins it would have spared a lot of grief over the years. — Colson Whitehead

Freedom was a community laboring for something lovely and rare. — Colson Whitehead

Today's marginalization of Christianity is a direct result of our failure to understand our faith as a total worldview. — Charles Colson

The Bible has, amazingly- no doubt with supernatural grace-survived its critics. The harder tyrants try to eliminate it and skeptics dismiss it, the better read it becomes. — Charles Colson

That's how the European tribes operate, she said. If they can't control it, they destroy it. — Colson Whitehead

You are a soulless monster whose fright mask is incapable of capturing human expressions. — Colson Whitehead

And for the second time that day he blesses the certainty of airports because he can always turn around and go someplace else. — Colson Whitehead

Who speaks for God? He does quite nicely for Himself. Through His holy and infallible Word - and the quiet obedience of His servants. — Charles Colson

Redeeming culture is the never ending mission of the church. — Charles Colson

The gospel of Jesus Christ must be the bad news of the conviction of sin before it can be the Good News of redemption. The truth is revealed in God's Holy Word; life can be lived only in absolute and disciplined submission to its authority. — Charles Colson

Live every minute as if you are late for the last train. — Colson Whitehead

I get invited to do panels with other Brooklyn writers to discuss what it's like to be a writer in Brooklyn. I expect it's like writing in Manhattan, but there aren't as many tourists walking very slowly in front of you when you step out for coffee. It's like writing in Paris, but there are fewer people speaking French. — Colson Whitehead

Our character is determined not by our circumstances but by our reaction to those circumstances. — Charles W. Colson

It was nigh impossible to understand Howard's speech under normal circumstances. He favored a pidgin of his lost African tongue and slave talk. In the old days, her mother had told her, that half language was the voice of the plantation. They had been stolen from villages all over Africa and spoke a multitude of tongues. The words from across the ocean were beaten out of them over time. For simplicity, to erase their identities, to smother uprisings. All the words except for the ones locked away by those who still remembered who they had been before. "They keep 'em hid like precious gold," Mabel said. — Colson Whitehead

If you were a thing - a cart or a horse or a slave - your value determined your possibilities. — Colson Whitehead

Freedom was a thing that shifted as you looked at it, the way a forest is dense with the trees up close but from the outside, from the empty meadow, you see its true limits. Being free had nothing to do with chains or how much space you had. On the plantation, she was not free, but she moved unrestricted on its acres, tasting the air and tracing the summer stars. The place was big in its smallness. Here, she was free of her master but slunk around a warren so tiny she couldn't stand. — Colson Whitehead

The church is the only institution supernaturally endowed by God. It is the one institution of which Jesus promised that the gates of hell will not prevail against it. — Charles Colson

Some labeled Jerry Falwell an American version of the Ayatollah Khomeni. People for the American Way, a group organized to counter the Moral Majority, launched a slick media campaign attaching the Nazi slur to the religious right. — Charles Colson

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

Nearly every grave moral failure begins with a small sin. — Charles Colson

We should always pray with as much earnestness as those who expect everything from God; we should always act with as much energy as those who expect everything from themselves. — Charles Colson

The Bible's power rests upon the fact that it is the reliable, errorless, and infallible Word of God. — Charles Colson

In her Georgia misery she had pictured freedom, and it had not looked like this. Freedom was a community laboring for something lovely and rare. Mingo — Colson Whitehead

No, Fulton was colored. She understands this luminous truth. Natchez did not lie about that: she has seen it in the man's books, made plain by her new literacy. In the last few days she has learned how to read, like a slave does, one forbidden word at a time. — Colson Whitehead

Since the night she was kidnapped she had been appraised and reappraised, each day waking upon the pan of a new scale. Know your value and you know your place in the order. To escape the boundary of the plantation was to escape the fundamental principles of your existence: impossible. It — Colson Whitehead

He possessed a strange facility for the mandatory. — Colson Whitehead

He hovered on unexceptionality. — Colson Whitehead

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 at any moment. — Colson Whitehead

I was inspired to become a writer by horror movies and science fiction. — Colson Whitehead

We Anhedonians have adapted to long periods between good news. Our national animal is the hope camel. We have no national bird. All the birds are dead. — Colson Whitehead

Stubborn breaks when it don't bend, — Colson Whitehead

Later he decided the specifics were not important, that the true lesson of accidents is not the how or the why, but the taken-for-granted world they exile you from. — Colson Whitehead

Three cheers for your rich interior life, may it serve you well come rent day. — Colson Whitehead

I write books and either people read them or they don't read them. The rise of Facebook or e-books doesn't change the difficulty level of writing sentences and thinking up new ideas. — Colson Whitehead

Nature is a strong brand name. Everybody knew that. First thing, Nomenclature 101. Slap Natural on the package, you were golden. Those words on the package promise ease from metropolitan care, modern worries. And out here, if you opened things up, underneath the cellophane, what did you find inside? That fruit has splendid packaging, it has solid consumer awareness and is an animal favorite. Its seeds will be deposited in spoor miles away and its market dominance will increase. Splendid and beautiful petals are great advertising
the insects buzz and hop from all points every weekend to hit this flower-bed mall. Natural selection was market forces. In business, in the woods: what is necessary to the world will last. — Colson Whitehead

It was time to get out of what Coach called "small-stack mentality." I no longer had to play like I was trying to escape the space station before it self-destructed, as the chirpy computer voice counted down. — Colson Whitehead

That which man builds man destroys, but the city of God is built by God and cannot be destroyed by man. AUGUSTINE — Charles W. Colson

God doesn't want our success; He wants us. He doesn't demand our achievements; He demands our obedience. — Charles Colson

If you want to see what this nation is all about, you have to ride the rails. Look outside as you speed through, and you'll find the true face of America. It was a joke, then, from the start. There was only darkness outside the windows on her journeys, and only ever would be darkness. — Colson Whitehead

We could not help but believe in God. — Charles W. Colson

He embraced the runaways with desperate affection. Cora couldn't help but shrink away. Two white men in two days had their hands around her. Was this a condition of her freedom? — Colson Whitehead

Some say society must change in order to change people. No, people must be changed in order to change society. — Charles Colson

But it's like riding a bike. A hell-bike, made out of hell. — Colson Whitehead

Today's widespread relegation of religion to merely something people do only in the privacy of their homes or churches would have been unimaginable to the founders of the republic - even those who personally repudiated orthodox Christian faith. — Charles Colson

To turn away from the great questions and dilemmas of life is a tragedy, for the quest for meaning and truth makes life worth living. — Charles Colson

Culture is religion incarnate. — Charles Colson

Power is like saltwater; the more you drink, the thirstier you get. — Charles Colson

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. — Colson Whitehead

Christians who understand biblical truth and have the courage to live it out can indeed redeem a culture, or even create one. This is the challenge facing all of us in the new millennium. — Charles W. Colson

Money was new and unpredictable and liked to go where it pleased. Some — Colson Whitehead

memory has a palette and broad brush. — Colson Whitehead

One day a pickaninny was happy and the next the light was gone from them; in between they had been introduced to a new reality of bondage. — Colson Whitehead

I'd walk over my own grandmother to re-elect Richard Nixon. — Charles Colson

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

Our government disdains a risk-reward game that millions of Americans play," Matt wrote, "then bails out Wall Street sharks who bet unfathomable sums. I can only conclude that this contradictory stance has little to do with the skills required for each pursuit. No, for some reason, lawmakers just don't like poker. — Colson Whitehead

Moral crusaders with zeal but no ethical understanding are likely to give us solutions that are worse than the problems. — Charles W. Colson

They were exiles, but Hob provided a type of protection once they settled in. By playing up their strangeness, the way a slave simpered and acted childlike to escape a beating, they evaded the entanglements of the quarter. The walls of Hob made a fortress some nights, rescuing them from the feuds and conspiracies. White men eat you up, but sometimes colored folk eat you up, too. She — Colson Whitehead

It was a magnificent operation, from seed to bale, but not one of them could be prideful of their labor. It had been stolen from them. Bled from them. The tunnel, the tracks, the desperate souls who found salvation in the coordination of its stations and timetables - this was a marvel to be proud of. She wondered if those who had built this thing had received their proper reward. — Colson Whitehead

Weeks passed, but my Word-A-Day Calendar was stuck on motherfucker. — Colson Whitehead

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. — Colson Whitehead

When they got to Oklahoma there were still more white people waiting for them, squatting on the land the Indians had been promised in the latest worthless treaty. Slow learners, the bunch. — Colson Whitehead

All he felt now was envy. These people had expectations. Of the world, of the future, it didn't matter
expectation was such an innovative concept to him that he couldn't help but be a bit moved by what they were saying. Whatever that was. — Colson Whitehead

In his 1978 Harvard commencement address, Solzhenitsyn listed a litany of woes facing the West: the loss of courage and will, the addiction to comfort, the abuse of freedom, the capitulation of intellectuals to fashionable ideas, the attitude of appeasement with evil. — Charles W. Colson

The masks had been made in Korea, delivering back to the West the faces they had given the rest of the globe: presidents, screen stars, and mass murderers. The rubber filament inevitably snapped from the staple after five minutes. The graft wouldn't take. — Colson Whitehead

It's not simply that communists are atheists and want to stamp out religion; it's that they cannot tolerate anyone who worships a King who stands above the kings of this world. For that higher allegiance gives a basis for demanding freedom and rights from the earthly king.49 — Charles W. Colson

The weak link-- she liked the ring of it. To seek the imperfection in the chain that keeps you in bondage. Taken individually, the link was not much. But in concert with its fellows, a mighty iron that subjugated millions despite its weakness. The people she chose, young and old, from the rich part of town or the more modest streets, did not individually persecute Cora. As a community, they were shackles. If she kept at it, chipping away at weak links wherever she found them, it might add up to something. — Colson Whitehead

Spoiler: I didn't win the Main Event. You had suspicions, you say? For one thing, the subtitle of this book would be "The Amazing Life-Affirming Story of an Unremarkable Jerk Who Won the World Series of Poker!" instead of having the word "Death" in it. For another, do these sound like the words of a motherfucker who won a million goddamn dollars? — Colson Whitehead

This isn't going to un-fuck itself. — Colson Whitehead

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

The doctor was a frequent visitor at Miss Trumball's establishment, preferring it to the Lanchester house, whose girls had a saturnine disposition in his opinion, as if imported from Maine or other gloom-loving provinces. — Colson Whitehead

Growing up devouring horror comics and novels, and being inspired to become a writer because of horror novels, movies, and comic books, I always knew I was going to write a horror novel. — Colson Whitehead

In other words, fiction is payback for those who have wronged you. — Colson Whitehead

Here's a tip for new parents: Start lowering those expectations early, it's going to pay off later. — Colson Whitehead

The Bible-banned, burned, beloved-is more widely read and more frequently attacked than any other book in history. — Charles Colson

A monster is a person who has stopped pretending. — Colson Whitehead

Tonight the song you always despised strides from the jukebox full-bodied and you hear the lyrics for the first time, understand the lyrics for the first time after all these years. This new you with an older soul. Now it's your favorite. All this time singing the wrong words. — Colson Whitehead

Christians should never have a political party. It is a huge mistake to become married to an ideology, because the greatest enemy of the gospel is ideology. Ideology is a man-made format of how the world ought to work, and Christians instead believed in the revealing truth Scripture. — Charles W. Colson

In keeping with my family's affection for doomed product lines and hexed formats, we purchased a Betamax. The year before, we'd bought a TRS-80 instead of an Apple II, and in due course we'd unbox Mattel's Intellivision, instead of Atari's legendary gizmo. This was good training for a writer, for the sooner you accept the fact that you are a deluded idiot who is always out of step with reality the better off you will be. — Colson Whitehead

of a runaway? 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 — Colson Whitehead

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

The Four Questions?" "As put forth by Mettleheim: How did this happen? How could this happen? Is it exceptional? How will it be avoided in the future? — Colson Whitehead

All I truly know is that we rise and fall as one, one colored family living next door to one white family. We may not know the way through the forest, but we can pick each other up when we fall, and we will arrive together." - — Colson Whitehead

She had not been his and now she was his. Or she had always been his and just now knew it. Cora's attention detached itself. It floated someplace past the burning slave and the great house and the lines that defined the Randall domain. She tried to fill in its details from stories, sifting through the accounts of slaves who had seen it. Each time she caught hold of something - buildings of polished white stone, an ocean so vast that there wasn't a tree in sight, the shop of a colored blacksmith who served no master but himself - it wriggled free like a fish and raced away. She would have to see it for herself if she were to keep it. — Colson Whitehead

As it often did when I thought about chicken wings and entropy, my mind turned to Emerson. "Life is a journey, not a destination." Now that was one stone-cold motherfucker who was not afraid to deliver the truth: After the torments of the journey, you have been well-prepared for the agonies of the destination. — Colson Whitehead

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

I write the books that I'm compelled to and I definitely learn things about the world when I write them, and I hope that other people get something out of them, enjoy them, see the world differently when they're done. — Colson Whitehead

Tennessee was cursed. Initially, she assigned the devastation of Tennessee, the blaze and the disease, to justice. The whites got what they deserved for enslaving her people, for massacring another race, for stealing the very land itself. Let them burn by flame or fever, let the destruction started here roll acre by acre until the dead have been avenged. But if people received their just portion of misfortune, what had she done to bring her troubles on herself? — Colson Whitehead

You have to stand up real close to the posters to see the swirls, and even then they're easy to miss: Lila Mae had to have Jimmy point them out to her. Horns, boiling cysts, the occasional cussword inked in across Chancre's slat teeth - they add up after a while, somehow more personal and meaningful than the usual cartoons and pinups of office homesteading. — Colson Whitehead

People who cannot restrain their own baser instincts, who cannot treat one another with civility, are not capable of self-government ... without virtue, a society can be ruled only by fear, a truth that tyrants understand all too well — Charles W. Colson

Resentment was the hinge of her personality. — Colson Whitehead

Suck it, Entropy. We have an appointment, my old friend, but not today. — Colson Whitehead

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

Hipsters seek refuge in church, Our Lady of Perpetual Subculture. There is some discussion as to whether or not they are still cool but then they are calmed by the obscure location and the arrival of their kind. Keep the address to yourself, let the rabble fund it themselves. Wow, this crappy performance art is really making me feel no so terrible about my various emotional issues. — Colson Whitehead