Harlem Shuffle Quotes

“Crooked world, straight world, same rules - everybody had a hand out for the envelope.”
― Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle

“I'm an entrepreneur."

"Entrepreneur?" Pepper said the last part like manure. "That's just a hustler who pays taxes.”
― Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle

“Everyone had secret corners and alleys that no one else saw—what mattered were your major streets and boulevards, the stuff that showed up on other people’s maps of you.”
― Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle

“Alma used the word settled the way less genteel people used motherfucker, as a chisel to pry open a particular feeling.”
― Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle

“If you believed in the holy circulation of envelopes, everything that went down happened because a man took an envelope and didn’t do his job. An envelope is an envelope. Disrespect the order and the whole system breaks down.”
― Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle

“The way he saw it, living taught you that you didn't have to live the way you'd been taught to live. You came from one place but more important was where you decided to go.”
― Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle

“What had started it, the mess this week? A white cop shot an unarmed black boy three times and killed him. Good old American know-how on display: We do marvels, we do injustice, and our hands were always busy.”
― Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle

“You have to have an inside you, she used to say, and an outside you. Ain't nobody's business who you are really, so it's up to you what you gave them.”
― Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle

“Carney was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked…”
― Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle

“One night Freddie said the stars made him feel small. The boys’ constellation knowledge stalled after the Dippers and the Belt, but you didn’t have to know what something was called to know how it made you feel, and looking at the stars didn’t make Carney feel small or insignificant, the stars made him feel recognized. They had their place and he had his. We all have our station in life—people, stars, cities—and even if no one looked after Carney and no one suspected him capable of much at all, he was going to make himself into something.”
― Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle

“Strivers grasped for something better-and crooks schemes about how to manipulate the present system. The world as it might be versus the world as it was. But perhaps Carney was being too stark. Plenty of crooks were strivers, and plenty of strivers bent the law.”
― Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle

“Robbing the Hotel Theresa was like taking a piss on the Statue of Liberty. It was like slipping Jackie Robinson a Mickey the night before the World Series.”
― Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle

“from one place but more important was where you decided to go.”
― Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle

“At the end of the day when she propped him up and told him he could do it, he puzzled over these alien things she offered him. Kindness and faith, he didn’t know which box to put them in.”
― Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle

“Part of moving up in the world is realizing how much shit you used to eat.”
― Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle

“He cleared his throat, he gestured, and remained a black ghost, store after store, accumulating the standard humiliations, until he climbed the black iron steps to Aronowitz & Sons and the proprietor asked, “Can I help you, sir?” Can I help you as in Can I help you? As opposed to What are you doing here? Ray Carney, in his years, had a handle on the variations.”
― Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle

“Entrepreneur?” Pepper said the last part like manure. “That’s just a hustler who pays taxes.”
― Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle

“Gnaw on a disappointment long enough and it will lose all flavor.”
― Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle

“Black people always found a way in the most miserable circumstances. If we didn't, we'd have been exterminated by the white man long ago.”
― Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle

“He felt unreal those days of the riots when his streets were made strange by violence. Despite what America saw on the news, only a fraction of the community had picked up bricks and bats and kerosene. The devastation had been nothing compared to what lay before him now, but if you bottled the rage and hope and fury of all the people of Harlem and made it into a bomb, the results would look something like this.”
― Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle

“Bottom line: A man has a mind to place an ad and possesses the means, you run the ad. Save the censorship for the front page.”
― Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle

“His cousin Freddy brought him in on the heist one hot night in early June.

It was such a pretty block and on certain nights when it was cool and quiet it was as if you didn’t live in the city at all.”
― Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle

“The property wasn’t much to look at, but it might make a man his fortune. Carney took the previous tenants’ busted schemes and failed dreams as a kind of fertilizer that helped his own ambitions prosper, the same way a fallen oak in its decomposition nourishes the acorn.”
― Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle

“There was pain and then there was pain. Different magnitudes you could stand or not stand. Wetting your beak and wetting your beak.”
― Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle

“He was a strange mix--congenial but reserved in a way that told you being friendly was an act of will.”
― Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle

“It was in the realm of his humor, and Carney had doubtless laughed. You get older and the old jokes grow less funny.”
― Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle

“America was big and blighted in gamey spots by racial intolerance and violence. Visiting relatives in Georgia? Here are the safe routes around the sundown towns and cracker territories where you might not make it out alive, the towns and counties to be avoided if you valued your life.”
― Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle

“One thing I’ve learned in my job is that life is cheap, and when things start getting expensive, it gets cheaper still.”
― Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle

“Sucker. The mistake was to believe he’d become someone else. That the circumstances that shaped him had been otherwise, or that to outrun those circumstances was as easy as moving to a better building or learning to speak right. Hard stop on the t. He knew where he stood now, had always known, even if he’d gotten confused; there was the matter of redress.”
― Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle

“At first, it didn't sound like Carney. But then, Big Mike had tended his crop of grudges like a farmer, inspecting the rows, taking care they got enough water and fertilizer so that they grew big and healthy.”
― Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle