Colson Whitehead Quotes

The New Orleans I knew ain't no more.

Everything in New York seems to merit preserving. If it's not historical, it's personal. If it's not personal, it's cultural. But you can't. You can't save everything. You just have to pack it up in your brain and take it with you when you go.

To put off the inevitable, we try to fix the city in place, remember it as it was, doing to the city what we would never allow to be done to ourselves. . . . New York City does not hold our former selves against us. Perhaps we can extend the same courtesy.

With the death of my father, it wasn't just the objects of everyday life that had changed; even the most ordinary street scenes had become irreplaceable mementos of a lost world whose every detail figured in the meaning of the whole.

This was the first time in my life that so many things would never happen again.

When I look at my old pictures, all I can see is what I used to be but am no longer. I think: What I can see is what I am not.

Time is never time at all. You can never ever leave without leaving a piece of youth. And our lives are forever changed. We will never be the same. The more you change, the less you feel.

How those fires burned that are no longer, how the weather worsened, how the shadow of the seagull vanished without a trace. Was it the end of a season, the end of a life? Was it so long ago it seems it might never have been? What is it in us that lives in the past and longs for the future, or lives in the future and longs for the past? (from "No Words Can Describe It")

That is the saddest part when you lose someone you love - that person keeps changing. And later you wonder, Is this the same person I lost? Maybe you lost more maybe less, then thousand different things that come from your memory or imagination - and you do not know which is which, which was true, which is false.

This house sheltered us, we spoke, we loved within those walls. That was yesterday. To-day we pass on, we see it no more, and we are different, changed in some infinitesimal way. We can never be quite the same again.

Don't think about what you've left behind.

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

The dream is over. I gotta get down to reality. The good old days is garbage.

What we have never had, remains; It is the things we have that go.

If I were to be really petulant, I would say New York is the one doing the betraying. Because the New York I fell in love with doesn't really exist anymore.

I remember things being more clearer, at one time things were more real.

San Francisco isn't what it used to be, and it never was.

We're captive on the carousel of time, we can't return we can only look behind.

You can't go home again because home has ceased to exist except in the mothballs of memory.

This is the time to remember cause it will not last forever. These are the days to hold onto cause we won't although we'll want to.

Nothing lasts. So it's my belief, yes, I know a lot of the things that we liked didn't last, but maybe things we don't like, they're also not going to last. There has been progress in my lifetime. There are certainly things that are better than when I was young, and there are things that are worse. New York City, it's worse. There's no question.

We are all our own graveyards, I believe; we squat amongst the tombs of the people we were. If we're healthy, every day is a celebration, a Day of the Dead, in which we give thanks for the lives that we lived, and if we are neurotic we brood and mourn and wish that the past was still present.

We can never go back.

It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity.

I feel some unwillingness to quit the remembrance of the past. With all the hope of the new I feel that we are leaving the old.