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.

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.

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.

Stolen bodies working stolen land. It was an engine that did not stop, its hungry boiler fed with blood.

Resentment was the hinge of her personality.

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.

Racial prejudice rotted one's faculties, he said.

No nation has ever taxed itself into prosperity.

When you read and understand a poem comprehending its rich and formal meanings then you master chaos a little.

What is evil? - Whatever springs from weakness.

Things can change in a day.

There is nothing outside of the text. [Fr., Il n'y a pas de hors-texte.]

The more light you have in an image, the less drama you get. The details start taking over; the mystery is all gone.

When fleeing the scene of temptation, do not leave a forwarding address.

I was raised to speak out about politics and the world around me. I would do it whether I was in the public or not. It is the way I was taught. The American way

The universe was a vast machine yesterday, it is a hologram today. Who knows what intellectual rattle we'll be shaking tomorrow.

The magnificently humble. The enormously small. The meaningfully ridiculous. Robert Walser's work often reads like a dazzling answer to the question, How immense can modesty be?