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07e977a
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The only time "early bloomer" has ever been applied to me is vis-a-vis my premature apprehension of the deep dread-of-existence thing. In all other cases, I plod and tromp along. My knuckles? Well dragged."
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dread
existence
maturity
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Colson Whitehead |
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9aba9ad
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Two people, two hands, and two songs, in this case "Big Shot" and "Bette Davis Eyes." The lyrics of the two songs provided no commentary, honest or ironic, on the proceedings. They were merely there and always underfoot, the insistent gray muck that was pop culture. It stuck to our shoes and we tracked it through our lives."
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life
music
pop-culture
songs
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Colson Whitehead |
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02f1239
|
White man trying to kill you slow every day, and sometimes trying to kill you fast. Why make it easy for him? That was one kind of work you could say no to.
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death
escape
race-relations
slavery
slaves
whites
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Colson Whitehead |
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8927f3d
|
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.
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hell
redemption
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Colson Whitehead |
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63367d2
|
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.
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Colson Whitehead |
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632fbb9
|
Who are you after you finish something this magnificent--in constructing it you have also journeyed through it, to the other side. On one end there was who you were before you went underground, and on the other end a new person steps out into the light. The up-top world must be so ordinary compared to the miracle beneath, the miracle you made with your sweat and blood. The secret triumph you keep in your heart.
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Colson Whitehead |
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63471a3
|
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 ..
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Colson Whitehead |
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892b2e3
|
The city knows you better than any living person because it has seen you when you are alone.
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Colson Whitehead |
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4549060
|
Here was the true Great Spirit, the divine thread connecting all human endeavor - if you can keep it, it is yours. Your property, slave or continent. The American Imperative.
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Colson Whitehead |
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50e572d
|
I'd never been much of an athlete, due to a physical condition I'd had since birth (unathleticism). Perhaps if there were a sport centered around lying on your couch in a neurotic stupor all day, I'd take an interest.
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athleticism
laziness
sports
unathleticism
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Colson Whitehead |
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2bf593b
|
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 everyth..
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blame
devine-retribution
zombies
|
Colson Whitehead |
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b3f3720
|
A feeling settled over Cora. She had not been under its spell in years, since she brought the hatchet down on Blake's doghouse and sent the splinters into the air. She had seen men hung from trees and left for buzzards and crows. Women carved open to the bones with the cat-o'-nine-tails. Bodies alive and dead roasted on pyres. Feet cut off to prevent escape and hands cut off to stop theft. She had seen boys and girls younger than this beate..
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Colson Whitehead |
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885beb0
|
What does the perfect elevator look like, the one that will deliver us from the cities we suffer now, these stunted shacks? We don't know because we can't see inside it, it's something we cannot imagine, like the shape of angels' teeth. It's a black box.
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Colson Whitehead |
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3e71a47
|
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..
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Colson Whitehead |
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12012ed
|
This nation shouldn't exist, if there is any justice in the world, for its foundations are murder, theft, and cruelty. Yet here we are.
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Colson Whitehead |
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b9f65a6
|
And what else but a being cursed with the burden of free will would wear a poncho.
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Colson Whitehead |
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c5e0006
|
Maybe we become New Yorkers the day we realize that New York will go on without us.
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Colson Whitehead |
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2f49e4a
|
New York City does not hold our former selves against us. Perhaps we can extend the same courtesy.
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Colson Whitehead |
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590b74a
|
We can never make proper goodbyes. It was your last ride in a Checker cab and you had no warning. It was the last time you were going to have Lake Tung Ting shrimp in that kinda shady Chinese restaurant and you had no idea. If you had known, perhaps you would have stepped behind the counter and shaken everyone's hand, pulled out the disposable camera and issued posing instructions. But you had no idea. There are unheralded tipping points, a..
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Colson Whitehead |
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d65668b
|
Why do you watch TV shows -- and keep watching them -- if you don't like them?" Terence asked. Simple: Some days, all you have is gazing upon horror, and the small comfort of being surprised that it is not yours."
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Colson Whitehead |
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4d99f53
|
He imagined a town called A. Around the communal fire they're shaping arrowheads and carving tributes o the god of the hunt. One day some guys with spears come over the ridge, perform all kinds of meanness, take over, and the new guys rename the town B. Whereupon they hang around the communal fire sharpening arrowheads and carving tributes to the god of the hunt. Some climatic tragedy occurs -- not carving the correct tributary figurines pr..
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Colson Whitehead |
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4de50af
|
When the music started and the dancing commenced, they appreciated the extent of their gratitude for Jockey. Once again he picked the right day for a birthday. He had been attuned to a shared tension, a communal apprehension beyond the routine facts of their bondage. It had built up. The last few hours had dispelled much of the ill feeling. They could face the morning toil and the following mornings and the long days with their spirits repl..
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Colson Whitehead |
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f54583d
|
But it's like riding a bike. A hell-bike, made out of hell.
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Colson Whitehead |
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c7100a0
|
The weak link-- she liked the ring of it. To seek the imperfection in the chain that keeps you in bondage. Taken individually, the link was not much. But in concert with its fellows, a mighty iron that subjugated millions despite its weakness. The people she chose, young and old, from the rich part of town or the more modest streets, did not individually persecute Cora. As a community, they were shackles. If she kept at it, chipping away at..
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Colson Whitehead |
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878829a
|
Violence is the only lever big enough to move the world
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violence-in-society
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Colson Whitehead |
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fe1b535
|
We Anhedonians have adapted to long periods between good news. Our national animal is the hope camel. We have no national bird. All the birds are dead.
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Colson Whitehead |
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01823ac
|
see chains on another person and be glad they are not your own--such was the good fortune permitted colored people, defined by how much worse it could be at any moment.
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hope
slavery
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Colson Whitehead |
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7a8d70f
|
They will have to destroy this city once we deliver the black box. The current bones will not accommodate the marrow of the device. They will have to raze the city and cart off the rubble to less popular boroughs and start anew.
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Colson Whitehead |
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83190c0
|
She watches the people through the sooted panes. They walk slower than they do when she reports to work and when she leaves work, and differently still from weekend strolling. They are the tin men and rag dolls who wake after hours in the toy store.
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Colson Whitehead |
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774271d
|
The lobby of the Fanny Briggs Memorial Building was almost finished when she arrived. As if to distract from the minuscule and cramped philosophy of what would transpire on the floors above, the city offered visitors the spacial bounty of the lobby. The ersatz marble was firm underfoot like real marble, sheer, and produced trembling echoes effortlessly. The circle of Doric columns braced the weight above without complaint. The mural, howeve..
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Colson Whitehead |
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5b20fd4
|
Their lives had been an interminable loop of repeated gestures; now their existences were winnowed to this discrete and eternal moment.
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Colson Whitehead |
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669d460
|
As it often did when I thought about chicken wings and entropy, my mind turned to Emerson. "Life is a journey, not a destination." Now that was one stone-cold motherfucker who was not afraid to deliver the truth: After the torments of the journey, you have been well-prepared for the agonies of the destination."
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|
entropy
journeys
ralph-waldo-emerson
travel
|
Colson Whitehead |
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d0752c4
|
The word we. We are not one people but many different people. How can one person speak for this great, beautiful race--which is not one race but many, with a million desires and hopes and wished for ourselves and our children?
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Colson Whitehead |
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b463111
|
Improbable as it may be, the day still has a few indignities left. The day waters down indignity with frustration to make it last longer. Abomination, thy name is Subway. He cannot enter. They flood through turnstiles, hips banging rods, and will not let him enter. He must get home, but it's all he can do to get halfway in before another one charges at him. A fish out of school. Everybody knows how it works except for him. All of them from ..
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commuting
difficulties
indignities
subway
|
Colson Whitehead |
|
95d6323
|
Freedom was a thing that shifted as you looked at it, the way a forest is dense with the trees up close but from the outside, from the empty meadow, you see its true limits. Being free had nothing to do with chains or how much space you had. On the plantation, she was not free, but she moved unrestricted on its acres, tasting the air and tracing the summer stars. The place was big in its smallness. Here, she was free of her master but slunk..
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freedom
limits
outside
shift
space
|
Colson Whitehead |
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c8b4071
|
It was the softest bed she had ever lain in. But then, it was the only bed she had ever lain in.
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Colson Whitehead |
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bddbe3f
|
One of my dinner companions invited me on a strip-club excursion. I demurred, spoiled by the erotic revues of Anhedonia, where the performers remain fully clothed but get emotionally naked, delivering monologues about their top-shelf disappointments, and times when they were almost happy. Hard to enjoy American-style strip clubs after that. Once you go bleak, you never go back.
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Colson Whitehead |
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5132294
|
It was the day after Sam's house collapsed, though she couldn't be sure. Best to measure time now with one of the Randall plantation's cotton scales, her hunger and fear piling on one side while her hopes were removed from the other in increments. The only way to know how long you are lost in the darkness is to be saved from it.
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Colson Whitehead |
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a36ae59
|
Freedom was a thing that shifted as you looked at it, the way a forest is dense with trees up close but from outside, from the empty meadow, you see its true limits.
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Colson Whitehead |
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54a1062
|
On one end there was who you were before you went underground, and on the other end a new person steps out into the light.
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|
Colson Whitehead |
|
82a3f21
|
The Four Questions?" "As put forth by Mettleheim: How did this happen? How could this happen? Is it exceptional? How will it be avoided in the future?"
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Colson Whitehead |
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91a4259
|
and for the second time that day he blesses the certainty of airports because he can always turn around and go someplace else.
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Colson Whitehead |
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18caf45
|
Cherish your old apartments and pause for a moment when you pass them. Pay tribute, for they are the caretakers for your reinventions.
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Colson Whitehead |
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46332b9
|
As if these daily humiliations and sacrifices mean something, are tallied by the ones who keep the books. Tomorrow we pick up where we left off. Sleep tight. Sleep deep. Sleep the sleep of the successful because somehow you made it through the day without anyone finding out that you are a complete fraud.
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Colson Whitehead |