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Zone One QUOTES

Zone One QUOTES

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

― Colson Whitehead , Zone One

2 " 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

3 " Pain could be killed. Sadness could not, but the drugs did shut its mouth for a time. "

― Colson Whitehead , Zone One

4 " A society manufactures the heroes it requires. "

― Colson Whitehead , Zone One

5 " 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

6 " 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

7 " 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

8 " 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

9 " There were plenty of things in the world that deserved to stay dead, yet they walked. "

― Colson Whitehead , Zone One

10 " Everyone was fucked up in their own way; as before, it was a mark of one’s individuality. "

― Colson Whitehead , Zone One

11 " He told himself: Hope is a gateway drug, don't do it. "

― Colson Whitehead , Zone One

12 " 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

13 " And what else but a being cursed with the burden of free will would wear a poncho. "

― Colson Whitehead , Zone One

14 " But it's like riding a bike. A hell-bike, made out of hell. "

― Colson Whitehead , Zone One

15 " 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

16 " 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

17 " 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

18 " This isn't going to un-fuck itself. "

― Colson Whitehead , Zone One

19 " 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

20 " They were up past dawn, crashed, were granted absolution in its secular manifestation of late checkout. "

― Colson Whitehead , Zone One