Colson Whitehead

If niggers were supposed to have their freedom, they wouldn't be in chains. If the red man was supposed to keep hold of his land, it'd still be his. If the white man wasn't destined to take this new world, he wouldn't own it now.Here was the true Great Spirit, the divine thread connecting all human endeavor--if you can keep it, it is yours. Your property, slave or continent. The American imperative.

The other patrollers were boys and men of bad character; the work attracted a type. In another country they would have been criminals, but this was America.

my father liked his Indian talk about the Great Spirit," Ridgeway said. "All these years late, 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. One destiny by divine perscription--the American imperative.

The land she tilled and worked had been Indian land. She knew the white men bragged about the efficiency of the massacres, where they killed women and babies, and strangled their futures in the crib. Stolen babies working stolen land. It was an engine that did not stop, its hungry boiler fed with blood.

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.

The only time "early bloomer" has ever been applied to me is vis-a-vis my premature apprehension of the deep dread-of-existence thing. In all other cases, I plod and tromp along. My knuckles? Well dragged.

It is failure that guides evolution; perfection provides no incentive for improvement, and nothing is perfect.

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.

There was one moment of intersection, when the topic of hate-watching came up. "Why do you watch TV shows--and keep watching them--if you don't like them?" Terrence asked.Simple: Some days, all you have is gazing upon horror, and the small comfort of being surprised that it is not yours.