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a place where he not just lived but was understood.
His grandfather was forthright about almost all the matters of his and his family’s life, but about Norris he was evasive; it was accepted by everyone that Norris and his grandfather had an understanding, but despite Nathaniel Bingham’s avowed tolerance for all social classes and his avowed impatience with propriety, he had never introduced Norris as his companion, nor had he ever suggested, to his grandchildren or to anyone, that he might become legally bound to him.
So fierce was the competition for a child that recently the government had introduced a campaign encouraging people to adopt older children. But this had been largely unsuccessful, and it was well understood, even by the children themselves, that those over the age of six were unlikely to ever find a home.
children, their unflinching, unbroken gazes that suggested they could see him in a way that adults no longer bothered to or could,
hated in part because he felt that it might be a tune he would someday be able to sing from experience, that in it was his inevitable fate, but in this version, the man in the song sounded jaunty and careless, as if by never marrying he had been not deprived but delivered from a dismal future.
the piano, which stood behind the stool with his poor arrangement and, for all its batteredness, seemed the most beautiful, most compelling object there: a beacon, something shining and pure.
an iron chain around his neck, and of his shame for it.
Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner Allusion?
his charges would never be able to become musicians, might never even have the luxury of attending a musical performance, but he thought that he would at least be able to give them a spot of delight, of joy, in their lives, something they might carry with them, a source of pleasure they might always be able to call their own.
the people who are in peril are people who are, who are—excessive in who they are, who flaunt who they are, who ask to be noticed. We are not those kinds of people, and we never will be.” “But we are those kinds of people,
there would always be a moment in which he realized that he could see, that the night, which had at first seemed a featureless screen of black, toneless and silent, was brighter than it appeared, and although he always promised himself that he would determine the exact moment when it happened, when his eyes adjusted themselves to this different, filtered light, he never could: It happened so gradually, so without his participation, that it was as if his mind existed not to control his body but to marvel at its abilities, its capacity for adaptation.
Preparing to be thirty, much less forty or fifty, was like buying furniture for a house made of sand—who knew when it would be washed away, or when it would start disintegrating, falling apart in clots?
paperwork. It had been repellent, but David had understood it as well: Food was real, food was proof of life, of how your body was still yours, of how it still could and still would respond to whatever you put inside it, of how it could be made to work. To be hungry was to be alive, and to be alive was to need food.
Even his new grossness was a kind of shout, a defiance; he was a body that took up more space than was allowed, than was polite. He had made himself into a presence that couldn’t be ignored. He had made himself undeniable.
Theirs had been a generational suspension—some had found solace in anger, and others in silence.
But hiding hadn’t stopped things from happening. The only thing it prevented was eventually being found. Now
what we’re fighting against there: the oppression of the black man and woman, the oppression that’s gone on since America was founded and will go on and on until it burns down to the ground and we begin something new. Because there is no fixing what America is—there is no way to do work around the margins and say justice has been restored. No, brothers and sisters, that’s not how justice works. My mother worked as a nurse’s aide in what they used to call the Houston Negro Hospital, and she would tell me stories of the men and women who came in with heart attacks, about how they’d be gasping
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Suddenly I hated him—he possessed something I could not, and it wasn’t money but those words, rolling like smooth, shiny pebbles in his mouth, white and clean as the moon.
He was rich in belief; it was all he had.
How was I going to explain the world to you when I couldn’t understand it myself? How could I let you go into it when all around us were terrors and horrors, nightmares from which I’d never be able to wake you?
you wait and wait and wait—because you’re frightened, because you’ve always waited—and then, one day, the wait is over. In that moment, you forget what it was to wait. This state that you’d lived in for sometimes years is gone, and so is your memory of it. All you have at the end is loss.
Lipo-wao-nahele, but we had planted no trees, and the ones that were already there we were using as furniture. The place was now worse than unloved; it was degraded, and it was Edward and I who had degraded it.
They kept it out of the news altogether, actually—they in fact urged the president to order the mayor not to speak of it to any media, much less his citizens, which he did, and it’s rumored that this will lead next to an executive order that prohibits media outlets from publishing non-preapproved information about future outbreaks in the interest of national safety. The thinking is that panic would lead to people trying to flee the area, and early and aggressive containment is the only thing that halts a fast-spreading illness. I see the wisdom of this, of course, but I also think it’s a
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was like we were in two glass boxes that had been placed next to each other, and although other people could see us, we couldn’t see or hear anything outside our own boxes, and had no idea of how close we were to each other.
that everything you had suspected about this country—that America was not for everyone; that it was not for people like me, or people like you; that America is a country with sin at its heart—was true.
True selflessness, he said, meant giving of yourself to a stranger, someone whose life would never be entangled with your own.
The answer, implicit in the man’s question, was that a dystopia doesn’t look like anything; indeed, that it can look like anywhere else. And yet it also does look like something. The things I have described are elements of the sanctioned life, the life that can be lived aboveground. But out of the corner of our eyes, there is another life, one we see in glimpses, in movements.
Data, investigation, analysis, news, rumor: A dystopia flattens those terms into one. There is what the state says, and then there is everything else, and that everything else falls into one category: information.
Pretending is the cost of sanity. But we all know who we really are. If we have lived, it is because we are worse than we ever believed ourselves to be, not better.
had become, finally, just a house: a shelter, not a metaphor.
we were known but not named, tolerated but not recognized. We lived in a constant state of uncertainty, waiting for the day we would be declared enemies, waiting for the night when what we did would, in the space of an hour, a single signed document, be transformed from regrettable to criminal.
yet doing anything because your ancestors wanted to do it—fulfilling someone else’s ambition—is a poor motivation.
You chose your body or your mind, and he had chosen his mind.
I cannot promise that my granddaughter won’t be lonely, but I have prevented her from being alone.
to my loves, to freedom, to safety, to dignity—to paradise.
