In another country they would have been criminals, but this was America.
Did you know that smiling politely burns up the same amount of calories as speaking your mind.
Cora adored the old almanacs for containing the entire world.
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...
The man's posture said that he did not enjoy taking orders, and the insolence in his eyes was not slave insolence, an impotent pose, but a hard fact.
That was the man's real trouble, not the savage and uncanny civilizations he encountered--he kept forgetting what he had.
THE Andersons lived in a lovely clapboard house at the corner of Washington and Main, a few blocks past the hubbub of stores and businesses, where the town settled into private residences for the well...
Settlers needed the land, and if the Indians hadn’t learned by then that the white man’s treaties were entirely worthless, Ridgeway said, they deserved what they got.
Now that she had run away and seen a bit of the country, Cora wasn't sure the document described anything real at all. America was a ghost in the darkness, like her.
Make a career of humanity. Make it a central part of your life.
Isn't it great when you're a kid and the world is full of anonymous things? Everything is bright and mysterious until you know what it is called and then all the light goes out of it...Once we knew th...
In America the quirk was that people were things.
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.
By making a circle of themselves that separated the human spirits within from the degradation without. Noble
Sometimes good fortune is just having fewer messed-up things happening to you.
We may not know the way through the forest, but we can pick each other up when we fall, and we will arrive together. —
Truth was a changing display in a shop window, manipulated by hands when you weren’t looking, alluring and ever out of reach. The
To escape the boundary of the plantation was to escape the fundamental principles of your existence: impossible.
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.
The only currency to satisfy the debt was their survival and to help others when circumstances permitted.