## Metadata - Author: [[Colson Whitehead]] - Full Title: The Underground Railroad (Pulitzer Prize Winner) - Category: #books ## Highlights - That’s what a lie looks like, Cora thought, and marked it. ([Location 314](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01A4ATV0A&location=314)) - There was an order of misery, misery tucked inside miseries, and you were meant to keep track. ([Location 319](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01A4ATV0A&location=319)) - James had a nautilus disposition, burrowing into his private appetites, but Terrance inflicted every fleeting and deep-seated fancy on all in his power. ([Location 324](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01A4ATV0A&location=324)) - Sometimes a slave will be lost in a brief eddy of liberation. In the sway of a sudden reverie among the furrows or while untangling the mysteries of an early-morning dream. In the middle of a song on a warm Sunday night. Then it comes, always—the overseer’s cry, the call to work, the shadow of the master, the reminder that she is only a human being for a tiny moment across the eternity of her servitude. ([Location 411](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01A4ATV0A&location=411)) - the mesmerizing dance between commerce and desire. ([Location 724](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01A4ATV0A&location=724)) - ARNOLD Ridgeway’s father was a blacksmith. The sunset glow of molten iron bewitched him, the way the color emerged in the stock slow and then fast, overtaking it like an emotion, the sudden pliability and restless writhing of the thing as it waited for purpose. His forge was a window into the primitive energies of the world. ([Location 998](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01A4ATV0A&location=998)) - Craftsmen and artisans created items that were brittle rumors compared with his father’s iron facts. ([Location 1013](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01A4ATV0A&location=1013)) - Here was the true Great Spirit, the divine thread connecting all human endeavor—if you can keep it, it is yours. Your property, slave or continent. The American imperative. ([Location 1098](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01A4ATV0A&location=1098)) - Ridgeway gathered renown with his facility for ensuring that property remained property. When a runaway took off down an alley, he knew where the man was headed. The direction and aim. His trick: Don’t speculate where the slave is headed next. Concentrate instead on the idea that he is running away from you. Not from a cruel master, or the vast agency of bondage, but you specifically. It worked again and again, his own iron fact, in alleys and pine barrens and swamps. He finally left his father behind, and the burden of that man’s philosophy. Ridgeway was not working the spirit. He was not the smith, rendering order. Not the hammer. Not the anvil. He was the heat. ([Location 1100](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01A4ATV0A&location=1100)) - Morbid paradoxes confronted Stevens daily. His profession worked to extend life while secretly hoping for an increase in the deceased. A malpractice suit called you before the judge for want of a skill, but get caught with an ill-gotten cadaver and the judge punished you for trying to obtain that skill. ([Location 1849](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01A4ATV0A&location=1849)) - Jane was scarce-hipped and Cora now fit into her clothes with room. ([Location 2282](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01A4ATV0A&location=2282)) - Cora figured that a new wave of immigrants would replace the Irish, fleeing a different but no less abject country, the process starting anew. The engine huffed and groaned and kept running. They had merely switched the fuel that moved the pistons. ([Location 2318](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01A4ATV0A&location=2318)) - Whether in the fields or underground or in an attic room, America remained her warden. ([Location 2339](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01A4ATV0A&location=2339)) - The smoke filled the sky for hundreds of miles, tinting the sunset into gorgeous contusions of crimson and purple. ([Location 2747](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01A4ATV0A&location=2747)) - None of the Randall men was that bright. The place had undone them. They joked and they picked fast when the bosses’ eyes were on them and they acted big, but at night in the cabin after midnight they wept, they screamed from nightmares and wretched memories. In Caesar’s cabin, in the next cabins over, and in every slave village near and far. When the work was done, and the day’s punishments, the night waited as an arena for their true loneliness and despair. ([Location 3111](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01A4ATV0A&location=3111)) - He’d told her he wanted her for good luck—her mother was the only one to ever make it out. Probably a mistake, if not an insult, to someone like her. She wasn’t a rabbit’s foot to carry with you on the voyage but the locomotive itself. He couldn’t do it without her. ([Location 3136](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01A4ATV0A&location=3136)) - Poetry and prayer put ideas in people’s heads that got them killed, distracting them from the ruthless mechanism of the world. ([Location 3358](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01A4ATV0A&location=3358)) - Sometimes a useful delusion is better than a useless truth. ([Location 3844](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01A4ATV0A&location=3844)) - 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. ([Location 3928](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01A4ATV0A&location=3928)) - There were islands in the swamp—follow them to the continent of freedom. ([Location 3932](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01A4ATV0A&location=3932))