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7428d42
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because for him to do nothing was to undermine his own dignity.
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Colson Whitehead |
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bfc8588
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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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Colson Whitehead |
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de96818
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it trains the kid in question to determine when people in the corner of his eye are talking about him and when they are not, a useful skill in later life when sorting out bona-fide persecution from perceived persecution, the this-is-actually-happening from the mere paranoid manifestation
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persecution
race-in-america
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Colson Whitehead |
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54f8da9
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Rap was a natural resource, might as well pay for sunlight or the very breeze or an early-morning car alarm going off. No, I spent my money on music for moping. Perfect for drifting off on the divan with a damp towel on your forehead, a minor-chord soundtrack as you moaned into reflecting pools about your elaborate miserableness. The singers were faint, androgynous ghosts, dragging their too-heavy chains across the plains of misery, the glo..
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Colson Whitehead |
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8d40501
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To forbid the thought of escape, even that slightest butterfly thought of escape, was to murder one's humanity.
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Colson Whitehead |
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ee1c529
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Well, imagine you are alone in a room....Are you the best, most special person in the room right now? Yes. That's the gift of being alone.
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Colson Whitehead |
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57d0af3
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In death the negro became a human being. Only then was he the white man's equal. On
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Colson Whitehead |
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98f564f
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At intersections and crowded areas between sedans and trucks the gutter reflected the bitter pastels of metropolitan neon, rainbows hacked down to earth and dirt.
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Colson Whitehead |
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6a7de90
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Then it comes, always--the overseer's cry, the call to work, the shadow of the master, the reminder that she is only a human being for a tiny moment across the eternity of her servitude. The
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Colson Whitehead |
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de778da
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Pick your fights like you pick your nose: with complete awareness of where you are.
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Colson Whitehead |
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d31860d
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Slavery is a sin when whites were put to the yoke, but not the African. All men are created equal, unless we decide you are not a man. Under
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Colson Whitehead |
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974417d
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If you want to see what this nation is all about, I always say, you have to ride the rails. Look outside as you speed through, and you'll find the true face of America.' He slapped the wall of the boxcar as a signal. The train lurched forward.
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Colson Whitehead |
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b17667e
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One day a pickaninny was happy and the next the light was gone from them; in between they had been introduced to a new reality of bondage.
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Colson Whitehead |
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745d475
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The plastic-covered notebooks were candy-colored and palm-size, brimming with the characters and arcana of a prosperous and long-standing children's entertainment combine. The creation myth of the product line concerned the adventures of a clever, effeminate armadillo and his cohort of resourceful desert critters.
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Colson Whitehead |
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63ec679
|
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
|
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
|
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
|
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
|
They don't give gold bracelets for regrets.
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Colson Whitehead |
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8c3a888
|
Why should anyone else have it easy. Spoken like a true New Yorker.
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Colson Whitehead |
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6fe2067
|
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
|
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
|
Suck it, Entropy. We have an appointment, my old friend, but not today.
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Colson Whitehead |
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89ae135
|
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
|
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
|
She has always considered herself an atheist, not realizing she had a religion.
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Colson Whitehead |
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032b489
|
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
|
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
|
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
|
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
|
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
|
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
|
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
|
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
|
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
|
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
|
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
|
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
|
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
|
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
|
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
|
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
|
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 |