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.
Tipple sold his success much more effectively than he did. How to get excited about, take pride in something that came so naturally? It was like being honored for breathing.
This city is reward for all it will enable you to achieve and punishment for all the crimes it will force you to commit.
Suck it, Entropy. We have an appointment, my old friend, but not today.
She wondered why there were only two kinds of weather: hardship in the morning, and tribulation at night.
She wondered where he escaped from, how bad it was, and how far he traveled before he put it behind him.
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...
Patriots boasted of how often they’d been searched and given a clean bill.
No, Fulton was colored. She understands this luminous truth. Natchez did not lie about that: she has seen it in the man’s books, made plain by her new literacy. In the last few days she has learned ho...
Men start off good and then the world makes them mean. The world is mean from the start and gets meaner every day.
Looking at them now as folks chased in and out, getting ready, it was hard for Cora to image a time when the fourteen cabins hadn't been there. For all the wear, the complaints from deep in the wood a...
It wasn't until they were moving again that Cora realized she forgot to ask where they were headed.
Is this the truth of our historic encounter?
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...
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 la...
But we have all been branded, even if you can't see it - inside, if not without.
I'm here because I was born here and thus ruined for anywhere else, but I don't know about you.
Them from the ruthless mechanism of the world.
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.
Memory has a palette and broad brush.