Reading Notes: The Nickel Boys
Colson Whitehead
"Together they performed their own phantom archeology, digging through decades and restoring to human eyes the shards and artifacts of those days. Each man with his own pieces ... Resembling those fragments into confirmation of a shared darkness. If it is true for you it is true for someone else, and you are no longer alone."
"Elwood never ceased to marvel how you could walk around and get used to seeing only a fraction of the world. Not knowing you only saw a sliver of the real thing. This or this?. Definitely this, all that the van tumbled past, the sudden majesty of everything ..."
"It was crazy to run and crazy not to run. How could a boy look past the school's property line, see that free and living world beyond, and not contemplate a dash to freedom? To write one's own story for once. To forbid the thought of escape, even that slightest butterfly thought of escape, was to murder one's humanity."
"The recognition he sought went beyond brown skin - he was looking for someone who looked like him, for someone to claim as kin. For others to claim him as kin, those who saw the same future approaching, slow as it may be and overfond of back roads and secret hardscrabble paths, attuned to the deeper music in the speeches and hand-painted signs of protest. Those ready to commit their weight to the great lever and move the world. They never appeared."