10 Important Quotes from "The Nickel Boys"

Colson Whitehead, the author of Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Underground Railroad , has once again produced an extraordinary story in his newest piece of fiction, The Nickel Boys.

The Nickel Boys is based on the tragic and disturbing history of a reformatory school in Florida during the Jim Crow era. In the novel, Colson Whitehead sheds light on the violence and horror inside of the “Nickel Academy” and the ways in which young boys form an identity while fighting against an institution meant to break them. There are so many powerful truths within the writing, history, and story itself, these quotes are only a glimpse into the wise and heartbreaking world of The Nickel Boys.

Here are 10 Important Quotes from The Nickel Boys:

1.

“We must believe in our souls that we are somebody, that we are significant, that we are worthful, and we must walk the streets of life every day with this sense of dignity and this sense of somebody-ness.”

2.

“It was easy to root for the winners. No, he liked the punch-drunk ones, half walking at mile twenty-three, tongues flapping like Labradors. Tumbling across the finish line by hook or by crook, feet pounded to bloody meat in their Nikes. The laggards and limpers who weren’t running the course but running deep into their character—down into the cave to return to the light with what they found. By the time they got to Columbus Circle, the TV crews have split, the cone cups of water and Gatorade litter the course like daisies in a pasture, and the silver space blankets twist in the wind. Maybe they had someone waiting for them and maybe they didn’t. Who wouldn’t celebrate that?”

3.

“Violence is the only lever big enough to move the world.”

4.

“Perhaps Nickel was the very afterlife that awaited him, with a White House down the hill and an eternity of oatmeal and an infinite brotherhood of broken boys.”

5.

“If it is true for you, it is true for someone else, and you are no longer alone.”

6.

“To think of those Nickel nights where the only sounds were tears and insects, how you could sleep in a room crammed with sixty boys and still understand that you were the only person on earth. Everybody and nobody around at the same time. Here everybody was around and by some miracle you didn't want to wring their neck but give them a hug.”

7.

“Over time, Elwood saw that he was always simultaneously at home in whatever scene he found himself and also seemed like he shouldn’t have been there; inside and above at the same time; a part and apart. Like a tree trunk that falls across a creek—it doesn’t belong and then it’s never not been there, generating its own ripples in the larger current.”

8.

“He who gets behind in a race must forever remain behind or run faster than the man in front.”

9.

“You can change the law but you can’t change people and how they treat each other.”

10.

“There are big forces that want to keep the Negro down, like Jim Crow, and there are small forces that want to keep you down, like other people, and in the face of all those things, the big ones and the smaller ones, you have to stand up straight and maintain your sense of who you are.”

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