[b]Colson Whitehead
Freedom was a thing that shifted as you looked at it, the way a forest is dense with the trees up close but from the outside, from the empty meadow, you see its true limits. Being free had nothing to do with chains or how much space you had. On the plantation, she was not free, but she moved unrestricted on its acres, tasting the air and tracing the summer stars. The place was big in its smallness. Here, she was free of her master but slunk around a warren so tiny she couldn’t stand.[/b]
No getting around the slippery slope [or tangled web] that is freedom.
It was the softest bed she had ever lain in. But then, it was the only bed she had ever lain in.
So, in that sense it could have been the hardest bed.
He was a mediocre man. He had led a mediocre life exceptional only in the magnitude of its unexceptionality. Now the world was mediocre, rendering him perfect. He asked himself: How can I die? I was always like this. Now I am more me. He had the ammo. He took them all down.
I must fit in there somewhere, he thought.
…and for the second time that day he blesses the certainty of airports because he can always turn around and go someplace else.
Me, I’m a train station man myself.
Cherish your old apartments and pause for a moment when you pass them. Pay tribute, for they are the caretakers for your reinventions.
You know, if that actually turned out to be a good thing.
She wondered why there were only two kinds of weather: hardship in the morning, and tribulation at night.
And that’s before the calamity of climate change.