The Intuitionist

by Colson Whitehead

Everyone thinks, as they must, of last summer’s riots, of how strange it was to live in a metropolis such as this (magnificent elevated trains, five daily newspapers, two baseball stadiums) and yet be too afraid to leave the house. How quickly things can fall into medieval disorder.

It is failure that guides evolution; perfection provides no incentive for improvement, and nothing is perfect. Nothing we create works the way it should. The car overheats on the highway, the electric can opener cannot open the can. We must tend to our objects and treat them as newborn babes.

True faith is too serious to have room for the distraction of passion.

White people’s reality is built on what things appear to be—that’s the business of Empiricism.

There will be no redemption because the men who run this place do not want redemption. They want to be as near to hell as they can.