Live every minute as if you are late for the last train.
It was a gorgeous and intricate delusion, Manhattan, and from crooked angles on overcast days you saw it disintegrate, were forced to consider this tenuous creature in its true nature.
He who gets behind in a race must forever remain behind or run faster than the man in front.
Freedom was a community laboring for something lovely and rare.
Cora remembered Caesar's words about the men at the factory who were hunted by the plantation, carrying it here despite the miles. It lived in them. It still lived in all of them, waiting to abuse and...
Cora had become too accustomed to escaping unscathed from encounters with white authority.
And that great mixture was brought to America in the holds of slave ships. To the north, the south. Their sons and daughters picked tobacco, cultivated cotton, worked on the largest estates and smalle...
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.
All I truly know is that we rise and fall as one, one colored family living next door to one white family. We may not know the way through the forest, but we can pick each other up when we fall, and w...
Who knew what brand of mutiny his captives might cook up if they shared a common tongue.
White men squabbled before judges over claims to this or that tract hundreds of miles away that had been carved up on a map. Slaves fought with equal fervor over their tiny parcels at their feet.
When you remember this moment later you will understand that I was saying goodbye even if you did not know it.
Things are pretty much status quo with the sexual-tension friend.
They were up past dawn, crashed, were granted absolution in its secular manifestation of late checkout.
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 world may be mean, but people don't have to be, not if they refuse.
The world is mean from the start and gets meaner every day. It uses you up until you only dream of death. Mabel
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 wishes for...
The white men were silent. As if they’d given up or decided that a small freedom was the worst punishment of all, presenting the bounty of true freedom into painful relief. One
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.