The Underground Railroad (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

A plantation was a plantation; one might think one’s misfortunes distinct, but the true horror lay in their universality.

Had a brand of animal cleverness, the kind you see in pigs sometimes.

The whites came to this land for a fresh start and to escape the tyranny of their masters, just as the freemen had fled theirs. But the ideals they held up for themselves, they denied others.

In another country they would have been criminals, but this was America.

There was an order of misery, misery tucked inside miseries, and you were meant to keep track.

Once you got that old, you might as well be ninety-eight or a hundred and eight. Nothing left for the world to show you but the latest incarnations of cruelty.

David Bowie is in every book,

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.

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.