
The Underground Railroad (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

David Bowie is in every book,
Colson Whitehead • The Underground Railroad (Pulitzer Prize Winner)
List upon list crowded the ledger of slavery. The names gathered first on the African coast in tens of thousands of manifests. That human cargo. The names of the dead were as important as the names of the living, as every loss from disease and suicide—and the other mishaps labeled as such for accounting purposes—needed to be justified to employers.
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If you want to see what this nation is all about, you have to ride the rails. Look outside as you speed through, and you’ll find the true face of America. It was a joke, then, from the start. There was only darkness outside the windows on her journeys, and only ever would be darkness.
Colson Whitehead • The Underground Railroad (Pulitzer Prize Winner)
Stolen bodies working stolen land. It was an engine that did not stop, its hungry boiler fed with blood. With the surgeries that Dr. Stevens described, Cora thought, the whites had begun stealing futures in earnest. Cut you open and rip them out, dripping. Because that’s what you do when you take away someone’s babies—steal their future. Torture th
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Men start off good and then the world makes them mean. The world is mean from the start and gets meaner every day. It uses you up until you only dream of death.
Colson Whitehead • The Underground Railroad (Pulitzer Prize Winner)
“And America, too, is a delusion, the grandest one of all. The white race believes—believes with all its heart—that it is their right to take the land. To kill Indians. Make war. Enslave their brothers. 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. “I’m suppos
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The conflict in Europe was terrible and violent, she told her sailor, but she took exception to the name. The Great War had always been between the white and the black. It always would be.
Colson Whitehead • The Underground Railroad (Pulitzer Prize Winner)
The women in the colored dormitories of South Carolina believed they knew liberty, but the surgeons’ knives cut them to prove otherwise.