Zone One Quotes

“We never see other people anyway, only the monsters we make of them.”
― Colson Whitehead, Zone One

“A society manufactures the heroes it requires.”
― Colson Whitehead, Zone One

“Best to let the broken glass be broken glass, let it splinter into smaller pieces and dust and scatter. Let the cracks between things widen until they are no longer cracks but the new places for things. That was where they were now. The world wasn't ending: it had ended and now they were in the new place. They could not recognize it because they had never seen it before.”
― Colson Whitehead, Zone One

“Pain could be killed. Sadness could not, but the drugs did shut its mouth for a time.”
― Colson Whitehead, Zone One

“New York City in life was much like New York City in death. It was still hard to get a cab, for example.”
― Colson Whitehead, Zone One

“There were plenty of things in the world that deserved to stay dead, yet they walked.”
― Colson Whitehead, Zone One

“Everyone was fucked up in their own way; as before, it was a mark of one’s individuality.”
― Colson Whitehead, Zone One

“He told himself: Hope is a gateway drug, don't do it.”
― Colson Whitehead, Zone One

“Mark Spitz didn't ask about Harry. You never asked about the characters that disappeared from a Last Night story. You knew the answer. The plague had a knack for narrative closure.”
― Colson Whitehead, Zone One

“It had been a humdrum couple of days, reaffirming his belief in reincarnation: everything was so boring that this could not be the first time he'd experienced it.”
― Colson Whitehead, Zone One

“And what else but a being cursed with the burden of free will would wear a poncho.”
― Colson Whitehead, Zone One

“Emptiness was an index. It recorded the incomprehensible chronicle of the metropolis, the demographic realities, how money worked, the cobbled-together lifestyles and roosting habits. The population remained at a miraculous density, it seemed to him, for the empty rooms brimmed with evidence, in the stragglers they did or did not contain, in the busted barricades, in the expired relatives on the futon beds, arms crossed over their chests in ad hoc rites. The rooms stored anthropological clues re: kinship rituals and taboos. How they treated their dead.

The rich tended to escape. Entire white-glove buildings were devoid, as Omega discovered after they worried the seams of and then shattered the glass doors to the lobby (no choice, despite the No-No Cards). The rich fled during the convulsions of the great evacuation, dragging their distilled possessions in wheeled luggage of European manufacture, leaving their thousand-dollar floor lamps to attract dust to their silver surfaces and recount luxury to later visitors, bowing like weeping willows over imported pile rugs. A larger percentage of the poor tended to stay, shoving layaway bureaus and media consoles up against the doors. There were those who decided to stay, willfully uncomprehending or stupid or incapacitated by the scope of the disaster, and those who could not leave for a hundred other reasons - because they were waiting for their girlfriend or mother or soul mate to make it home first, because their mobility was compromised or a relative was debilitated, crutched, too young. Because it was too impossible, the enormity of the thought: This is the end. He knew them all from their absences.”
― Colson Whitehead, Zone One

“Mark Spitz had met plenty of the divine-retribution folks over the months. This was their moment; they were umbrella salesmen standing outside a subway entrance in a downpour. The human race deserved the plague, we brought it on ourselves for poisoning the planet, for the Death of God, the calculated brutalities of the global economic system, for driving primordial species to extinction: the entire collapse of values as evidenced by everything from nuclear fission to reality television to alternate side of the street parking. Mark Spitz could only endure these harangues for a minute or two before he split. It was boring.The plague was the plague. You were wearing galoshes, or you weren't.”
― Colson Whitehead, Zone One

“But it's like riding a bike. A hell-bike, made out of hell.”
― Colson Whitehead, Zone One

“They jostled one another, competed for space below as they did above, in a minuet of ruin and triumph. In the subway, down in the dark, no citizen was more significant or more decrepit than another. All were smeared into a common average of existence, the A's and the C's tumbling or rising to settle into a ruthless mediocrity. No escape.”
― Colson Whitehead, Zone One

“Their lives had been an interminable loop of repeated gestures; now their existences were winnowed to this discrete and eternal moment.”
― Colson Whitehead, Zone One

“It was a gorgeous and intricate delusion, Manhattan, and from crooked angles on overcast days you saw it disintegrate, were forced to consider this tenuous creature in its true nature.”
― Colson Whitehead, Zone One

“He had nerve damage: input could not penetrate. The world stalled out at his edges. Sometimes he had trouble speaking to other people, rummaging for language, and it seemed to him that an invisible layer divided him from the rest of the world, a membrane of emotional surface tension.”
― Colson Whitehead, Zone One

“He was a mote cycling in the wheels of a giant clock. Millions of people tended to this magnificent contraption, they lived and sweated and toiled in it, serving the mechanism of metropolis and making it bigger, better, story by glorious story and idea by unlikely idea. How small he was, tumbling between the teeth.”
― Colson Whitehead, Zone One

“This isn't going to un-fuck itself.”
― Colson Whitehead, Zone One

“In his mind, the business of existence was about minimizing consequences. The plague had raised the stakes, but he had been in training for this his whole life.”
― Colson Whitehead, Zone One

“Nowdays, Rosie the Rivetere was a former soccer mom who had just opened her own catering business when Last Night came down and her husband and kids were eaten by a parking attendant at the local megamall’s discount- appliance emporium.”
― Colson Whitehead, Zone One

“each opportunity for escape was undermined by his certainty that things were about to go back to normal, that this savage new reality could not hold.”
― Colson Whitehead, Zone One

“It was the sound of the god of death from one of the forgotten religions, the one that got it right, upstaging the pretenders with their billions of duped faithful. Every god ever manufactured by the light of cave fires to explain the thunder or calling forth the fashionable supplications in far-flung temples was the wrong one. He had come around after all this time, preening as he toured the necropolis, his kingdom risen at last.”
― Colson Whitehead, Zone One

“Manhattan was empty except for soldiers and legions of the damned, and already gentrification had resumed.”
― Colson Whitehead, Zone One

“On barstools they ogled the bachelorettes in the club and discussed their chances, recalling near-conquests from previous visits. In the buffet lines they foraged from the heat lamps and steam trays, and impaled and then swirled wasabi around tiny ceramic saucers, tinting soy sauce.”
― Colson Whitehead, Zone One

“The subway was the great leveler—underground, the Wall Street titans stood in the shuddering car and clutched the same poles as the junior IT guys to create a totem of fists, the executive vice presidents in charge of new product marketing pressed thighs with the luckless and the dreamers, who got off at their stations when instructed by the computer’s voice and were replaced by devisers of theoretical financial instruments of unreckoned power, who vacated their seats and were replaced in turn by unemployable homunculi clutching yesterday’s tabloids. They jostled one another, competed for space below as they did above, in a minuet of ruin and triumph. In the subway, down in the dark, no citizen was more significant or more decrepit than another. All were smeared into a common average of existence, the A’s and the C’s tumbling or rising to settle into a ruthless mediocrity. No escape. This was the plane where Mark Spitz lived. They were all him. Middling talents who got by, barnacles on humanity’s hull, survivors who had not yet been extinguished. Perhaps it was only a matter of time.”
― Colson Whitehead, Zone One

“The plastic-covered notebooks were candy-colored and palm-size, brimming with the characters and arcana of a prosperous and long-standing children's entertainment combine. The creation myth of the product line concerned the adventures of a clever, effeminate armadillo and his cohort of resourceful desert critters.”
― Colson Whitehead, Zone One

“He stopped hooking up with other people once he realized the first thing he did was calculate whether or not he could outrun them.”
― Colson Whitehead, Zone One

“He was a mediocre man. He had led a mediocre life exceptional only in the magnitude of its unexceptionality. Now the world was mediocre, rendering him perfect.”
― Colson Whitehead, Zone One