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63ec679
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You should have gone yourself, you ask for a Coke and they come back with orange drink. No one understands the martyrdom of the volunteers for the trip to food concession.
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humor
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Colson Whitehead |
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cd9a986
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They were up past dawn, crashed, were granted absolution in its secular manifestation of late checkout.
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Colson Whitehead |
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2d516dc
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You go on about reasons," Cora said. "Call things by other names as if it changes what they are. But that don't make them true."
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Colson Whitehead |
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47f839f
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Cora read the accounts of slaves who had been born in chains and learned their letters. Of Africans who had been stolen, torn from their homes and families, and described the miseries of their bondage and then their hair-raising escapes. She recognized their stories as her own. They were the stories as her own. They were the stories of all the colored people she had ever known, the stories of black people yet to be born, the foundations of ..
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Colson Whitehead |
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0725065
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People spare a minute or two relishing other people's setbacks before their own inadequacies distract them again. This is his umpteenth pint but he has a hollow leg or some sort of emptiness in himself and doesn't feel the least bit tipsy. What they take for her air of mystery is merely a side effect of her medication.
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Colson Whitehead |
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149c6c3
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They don't give gold bracelets for regrets.
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Colson Whitehead |
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8c3a888
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Why should anyone else have it easy. Spoken like a true New Yorker.
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Colson Whitehead |
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6fe2067
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I prefer the American spirit, the one that called us from the Old World to the New, to conquer and build and civilize. And destroy that what needs to be destroyed. To lift up the lesser races. If not lift up, subjugate. And if not subjugate, exterminate. Our destiny by divine prescription - the American imperative.
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Colson Whitehead |
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f1c4bf3
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Was it counterintuitive to apply lessons from a women's self-defense book to the World Series of Poker? Yes. But if modernity has taught us anything, it's that you don't fuck with Oprah.
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Colson Whitehead |
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1fc86ca
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Suck it, Entropy. We have an appointment, my old friend, but not today.
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Colson Whitehead |
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89ae135
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He had nerve damage: input could not penetrate. The world stalled out at his edges. Sometimes he had trouble speaking to other people, rummaging for language, and it seemed to him that an invisible layer divided him from the rest of the world, a membrane of emotional surface tension.
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Colson Whitehead |
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985c2e5
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Try to forget bit by bit, it will be easier on you. Leave it behind. Then the plane tilts in its escape and over the gray wing the city explodes into view with all its miles and spires and inscrutable hustle and as you try to comprehend this sight you realize that you were never really there at all.
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Colson Whitehead |
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8bb6fd0
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She has always considered herself an atheist, not realizing she had a religion.
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Colson Whitehead |
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032b489
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He was a mote cycling in the wheels of a giant clock. Millions of people tended to this magnificent contraption, they lived and sweated and toiled in it, serving the mechanism of metropolis and making it bigger, better, story by glorious story and idea by unlikely idea. How small he was, tumbling between the teeth.
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Colson Whitehead |
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7069d2b
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I feel about my phone the way horror-movie ventriloquists feel about their dummies: It's smarter than me, better than me, and I will kill anyone who comes between us.
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phones
smartphones
ventriloquist-dummies
ventriloquists
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Colson Whitehead |
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6a43817
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At ninety, everything is air and the difference between you and the medium of your passage is disintegrating with every increment of the ascension.
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Colson Whitehead |
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753b6b1
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In his mind, the business of existence was about minimizing consequences. The plague had raised the stakes, but he had been in training for this his whole life.
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Colson Whitehead |
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b424ec3
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Cora had heard Michael recite the Declaration of Independence back on the Randall plantation many times, his voice drifting through the village like an angry phantom. She didn't understand the words, most of them at any rate, but 'created equal' was not lost on her. The white men who wrote it didn't understand it either, if 'all men' did not truly mean all men.
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equality
freedom
slavery
united-states-of-america
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Colson Whitehead |
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b7b37ff
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Versifying left her cold. Poems were too close to prayer, rousing regrettable passions. Waiting for God to rescue you when it was up to you. Poetry and prayer put ideas in people's heads that got them killed, distracting them from the ruthless mechanism of the world.
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poems
poetry
prayer
self-reliance
verse
world
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Colson Whitehead |
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e0f64bd
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Here's a tip for new parents: Start lowering those expectations early, it's going to pay off later.
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expectations
parenting
parents
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Colson Whitehead |
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c42508f
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The masks had been made in Korea, delivering back to the West the faces they had given the rest of the globe: presidents, screen stars, and mass murderers. The rubber filament inevitably snapped from the staple after five minutes. The graft wouldn't take.
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Colson Whitehead |
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054cd95
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Our government disdains a risk-reward game that millions of Americans play," Matt wrote, "then bails out Wall Street sharks who bet unfathomable sums. I can only conclude that this contradictory stance has little to do with the skills required for each pursuit. No, for some reason, lawmakers just don't like poker."
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Colson Whitehead |
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18ddf33
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Plantation justice was mean and constant but the world was indiscriminate. Out in the world, the wicked escaped comeuppance and the decent stood in their stead at the whipping tree. Tennessee's disasters were the fruit of indifferent nature, without connection to the crimes of the homesteaders. To how the Cherokee had lived their lives.
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Colson Whitehead |
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bb4cf8d
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Royal joined the singing to change the subject and to remind her that there were things a body could feel good about. A community that had come together, from seeding to harvest to the bee. But the song was a work song Cora knew from the cotton rows, drawing her back to the Randall cruelties and making her heart thud. Connelly used to start the song as a signal to go back to picking after a whipping. how could such a bitter thing become a m..
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Colson Whitehead |
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9d17718
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The farm's carpenters were true artisans - they had to be to keep all those book from jumping off the shelves, so many wonders did they contain.
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Colson Whitehead |
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96e2e4a
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The negro's story may have started in this country with degradation, but triumph and prosperity would be his one day.
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Colson Whitehead |
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d782b8e
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He is fat and pink. On the United Elevator Co. advertisements, they airbrush away the pocks in his cheeks, the red slivers in his nose. In person he is too flesh, a handful of raw meat. Dogs have been known to follow him, optimistic.
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Colson Whitehead |
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660ea9a
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Spoiler: I didn't win the Main Event. You had suspicions, you say? For one thing, the subtitle of this book would be "The Amazing Life-Affirming Story of an Unremarkable Jerk Who Won the World Series of Poker!" instead of having the word "Death" in it. For another, do these sound like the words of a motherfucker who won a million goddamn dollars?"
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Colson Whitehead |
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c99aa42
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This city is reward for all it will enable you to achieve and punishment for all the crimes it will force you to commit.
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Colson Whitehead |
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d5e0e17
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The loneliness is the worst, because this knowledge is something that cannot be shared, only suffered. Just as well. Why should anyone else have it easy. Spoken like a true New Yorker.
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Colson Whitehead |
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933ccf1
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What a world it is, Cora thought, that makes a living prison into your only haven. Was she out of bondage or in its web: how to describe the status of a runaway? 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. Being free had nothing to do with chains or how much space you had. On the plantation, she was not free, but she mov..
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Colson Whitehead |
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1e8348e
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IF THEY THINK those two words New York will fix them, who are we to say otherwise.
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Colson Whitehead |
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0a2e195
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The only currency to satisfy the debt was their survival and to help others when circumstances permitted.
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Colson Whitehead |
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c28c026
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You have to stand up real close to the posters to see the swirls, and even then they're easy to miss: Lila Mae had to have Jimmy point them out to her. Horns, boiling cysts, the occasional cussword inked in across Chancre's slat teeth--they add up after a while, somehow more personal and meaningful than the usual cartoons and pinups of office homesteading.
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Colson Whitehead |
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cfa5245
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a new wave of immigrants would replace the Irish, fleeing a different but no less abject country, the process starting anew. The engine huffed and groaned and kept running. They had merely switched the fuel that moved the pistons. The
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Colson Whitehead |
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7a50079
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Dressed, she's in front of the mirror. Armed. She puts her face on. In her case, not a matter of cosmetics, but will. How to make such a sad face hard? It took practice. Not in front of a mirror or in front of strangers, gauging her success by their expressions of horror, disgust, etc. She did it by lying in her bed, feeling and testing which muscles in her face pained under application of concerted tension. To choose the most extreme pain ..
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Colson Whitehead |
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d206349
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An elevator doesn't exist without its freight. If there's no one to get on, the elevator remains in quiescence. The elevator and the passenger need each other.
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Colson Whitehead |
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12d1ae6
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The world is mean from the start and gets meaner every day. It uses you up until you only dream of death. Mabel
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Colson Whitehead |
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40b85d8
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The publicity of the present day causes that no sooner is a discovery or an invention made than it is already improved upon and surpassed by competing efforts.
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Colson Whitehead |
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033827c
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Rumors have flourished in worse soil than this.
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Colson Whitehead |
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bef052a
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Each thing had a value and as the value changed, everything else changed also. A broken calabash was worth less than one that held its water, a hook that kept its catfish more prized than one that relinquished its bait. In America the quirk was that people were things.
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Colson Whitehead |
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5065c4b
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The tunnel pulled at her. How many hands had it required to make this place? And the tunnels beyond, wherever and how far they led? She thought of the picking, how it raced down the furrows at harvest, the African bodies working as one, as fast as their strength permitted. The vast fields burst with hundreds of thousands of white bolls, strung like stars in the sky on the clearest of clear nights. When the slaves finished, they had stripped..
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Colson Whitehead |
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f133c77
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Failing at everything except his fear of success. Passed over yet again. Archivist of slights. Everyone else's good fortune is food out of your mouth or a hug you never got from someone who should have loved you better. Halfway through lunch she realized glass ceilings allow glimpses up into another person's hell.
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Colson Whitehead |
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8529a5b
|
What did you get for that, for knowing the day you were born into the white man's world? It didn't seem like the thing
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Colson Whitehead |