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4eb2ad5
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Cora adored the old almanacs for containing the entire world.
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Colson Whitehead |
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a842e30
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world. They didn't need people to say what they meant. The tables and facts couldn't be shaped into what they were not. The
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Colson Whitehead |
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c67b7cd
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As before, home was a beloved barricade. When school, work, the many-headed beast of strangers and villains comprising the world threatened to destroy, home remained, family remained, and the locks would hold, the lullabies would ward off all bogeymen. He was trapped in this house and he couldn't think of where else he'd rather be.
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Colson Whitehead |
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c37f23e
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Stolen bodies working stolen land. It was an engine that did not stop, its hungry boiler fed with blood. With the surgeries that Dr. Stevens described, Cora
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Colson Whitehead |
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117aa5a
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He who gets behind in a race must forever remain behind or run faster than the man in front.
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Colson Whitehead |
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d9de1b9
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Where the goblin world and its assaults were banished and there was nothing but possibility
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Colson Whitehead |
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67e768a
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Elwood said, "It's against the law." State law, but also Elwood's. If everyone looked the other way, then everybody was in on it. If he looked the other way, he was as implicated as the rest. That's how he saw it, how he'd always seen things."
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wrong
morality
complicity
law
right
guilt
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Colson Whitehead |
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4f4490c
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How's that training coming along, Griff? Good old Max says you're a natural." Turner frowned. Any time a white man asked you about yourself, they were about to fuck you over."
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boxing
blacks
whites
race-relations
training
race
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Colson Whitehead |
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c2b565b
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People get rid of plenty when they move--sometimes they're changing not just places but personalities.
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personality
life
castoffs
interior-decorating
furniture
moving
lives
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Colson Whitehead |
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b85e5cb
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To escape the boundary of the plantation was to escape the fundamental principles of your existence: impossible.
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Colson Whitehead |
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4cbbc26
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At a certain point he learned the smarter play was to avoid the things that brought you low.
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depression
sadness
life
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Colson Whitehead |
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0681931
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You can change the law but you can't change people and how they treat each other. Nickel
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Colson Whitehead |
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ebb0320
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How to get through the day if every indignity capsized you in a ditch? One learned to focus one's attention.
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Colson Whitehead |
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bec63ef
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Sometimes a slave will be lost in a brief eddy of liberation.
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Colson Whitehead |
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96e53d7
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the Lieutenant's theory of the barricades. Yes, they were the only vessel strong enough to contain our faith. But then there are the personal barricades, Mark Spitz thought. Since the first person met the second person. The ones that keep other people out and our madness in so we can continue to live. That's the way we've always done it. It's what this country was built on. The plague merely made it more literal, spelled it out in case you ..
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Colson Whitehead |
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7c7cc00
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Problem was, even if you avoided trouble, trouble might reach out and snatch you anyway. Another student might sniff out a weakness and start something, one of the staff dislikes your smile and knocks it off your face. You might stumble into a bramble of bad luck of the sort that got you here in the first place.
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Colson Whitehead |
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9cbf7a6
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He ate every miserable spoonful and ever since it struck him that adults are always trying to buy off children to make them forget their bad actions.
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Colson Whitehead |
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10858fc
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Taken individually, the link was not much. But in concert with its fellows, a mighty iron that subjugated millions despite its weakness.
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Colson Whitehead |
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dbf8170
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Even in death the boys were trouble.
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opening-lines
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Colson Whitehead |
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cb39cc2
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Most of those who know the story of the rings in the trees are dead by now. The iron is still there. Rusty. Deep in the heartwood. Testifying to anyone who cares to listen.
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Colson Whitehead |
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5c15b4b
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a small freedom was the worst punishment of all, presenting the bounty of true freedom into painful relief.
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Colson Whitehead |
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6a482bd
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Perhaps his life might have veered elsewhere if the US government had opened the country to colored advancement like they opened the army. But it was one thing to allow someone to kill for you and another to let him live next door.
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Colson Whitehead |
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513865a
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You can change the law but you can't change people and how they treat each other.
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Colson Whitehead |
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60831ea
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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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Colson Whitehead |
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9992701
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eccentric" being a word, Lila Mae notes dryly, that white people use to describe crazy white people of stature),"
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Colson Whitehead |
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e3ecd85
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The boys could have been many things had they not been ruined by that place. Doctors who cured diseases or perform brain surgery, inventing shit that saves lives. Run for president. All those lost geniuses - sure not all of them were geniuses, Chickie Pete for example was not solving special relativity - but they had been denied even the simple pleasure of being ordinary. Hobbled and handicapped before the race even began, never figuring ou..
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Colson Whitehead |
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d89403b
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But it was one thing to allow someone to kill for you and another to let him live next door.
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Colson Whitehead |
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0e39c36
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In here and out there are the same, but in here no one has to act fake anymore.
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Colson Whitehead |
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882a4ca
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When he heard autumn leaves skuttling in the wind, he remembered that chuckle.
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Colson Whitehead |
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a9656f0
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The boys knew to hide their enthusiasm over little kid things that still had an allure.
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Colson Whitehead |
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04e851b
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In our modern age, cell phone technology permits us to record the constant brutality that occurs all around us; we experience not an uptick in violence but a new kind of witnessing.
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violence
technology
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Colson Whitehead |
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844e78a
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ravages of prejudice and its bully partner, violence.
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Colson Whitehead |