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.
We never see other people anyway, only the monsters we make of them.
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 wished for ourselves and our children?
Here’s a tip for new parents: Start lowering those expectations early, it’s going to pay off later.
Mark Spitz didn’t ask about Harry. You never asked about the characters that disappeared from a Last Night story. You knew the answer. The plague had a knack for narrative closure.
The doctor was a frequent visitor at Miss Trumball’s establishment, preferring it to the Lanchester house, whose girls had a saturnine disposition in his opinion, as if imported from Maine or other gloom-loving provinces.
Pain could be killed. Sadness could not, but the drugs did shut its mouth for a time.
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.
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.
It is failure that guides evolution; perfection provides no incentive for improvement, and nothing is perfect.
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.
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 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.
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.
Stolen bodies working stolen land. It was an engine that did not stop, its hungry boiler fed with blood.
There will be no redemption because the men who run this place do not want redemption. They want to be as near to hell as they can.
Whoever has the better stuff wins. Sound familiar, American lackeys of late-stage capitalism?
That is how the European tribes operate, she said, If they can’t control it, they destroy it.
Slavery is a sin when whites were put to the yoke, but not the African. All men are created equal, unless we decide you are not a man.
From the trunk of their scheme, choices and decisions sprouted like branches and shoots.
What a world it is, Cora thought, that makes a living prison into your only haven. Was she out of bondage or in its web: how to describe the status of a runaway?
White man trying to kill you slow every day, and sometimes trying to kill you fast. Why make it easy for him? That was one kind of work you could say no to.
A slow hour passed, distracted by intermittent drops of moisture from above, as if the sky were conducting a feasibility study on the implications of rain. Of committing to a course of action.
I’d never been much of an athlete, due to a physical condition I’d had since birth (unathleticism). Perhaps if there were a sport centered around lying on your couch in a neurotic stupor all day, I’d take an interest.
Cora blamed the people who wrote it down. People always got things wrong, on purpose as much as by accident.
You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.
Maybe we become New Yorkers the day we realize that New York will go on without us.
New York City does not hold our former selves against us. Perhaps we can extend the same courtesy.
Cherish your old apartments and pause for a moment when you pass them. Pay tribute, for they are the caretakers for your reinventions.
The city knows you better than any living person because it has seen you when you are alone.
I’m here because I was born here and thus ruined for anywhere else, but I don’t know about you.
Why should anyone else have it easy. Spoken like a true New Yorker.
New York City in life was much like New York City in death. It was still hard to get a cab, for example.
Nowdays, Rosie the Rivetere was a former soccer mom who had just opened her own catering business when Last Night came down and her husband and kids were eaten by a parking attendant at the local megamall’s discount- appliance emporium.