Aleks

“And if you could make a study of the dead, Stevens thought from time to time, you could make a study of the living, and make them testify as no cadaver could.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

“The park sustained them, the green harbor they preserved as the town extended itself outward, block by block and house by house. Cora thought of her garden back on Randall, the plot she cherished. Now she saw it for the joke it was - a tiny square of dirt that had convinced her she owned something. It was hers like the cotton she seeded, weeded, and picked was hers. Her plot was a shadow of something that lived elsewhere, out of sight. The way poor Michael reciting the Declaration of Independence was an echo of something that existed elsewhere. 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.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

“He told her that every one of her enemies, all the masters and overseers of her suffering, would be punished, if not in this world then the next, for justice may be slow and invisible, but it always renders its true verdict in the end.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

“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.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad