The Warmth of Other Suns

it would prove for the first time in human history that there were galaxies other than our own, that the universe was much bigger than humans had ever imagined, that there were, in fact, other suns.

Every day, they were confronted with a difference they hadn’t noticed before, something so basic as a meal suddenly becoming a metaphor of the different worlds they came from.

She decided to keep the things that made her feel like home deep within herself

To his way of looking at it, they needed eight or nine years “before they seemed to get Americanized.”

She was used to wide-open spaces, trees everywhere, being able to see the sun set and rise and the sky stretched out over the field.

Now that he was nearly established, the people from Monroe turned out.

there were nine brothers in all, plus three girls that the parents had given boys’ names to, but that’s another story)

They called them rent parties.

fewer than half of all white southerners who left actually stayed in the North for good, thus behaving more like classic migrant workers than immigrants

Thus riots would become to the North what lynchings were to the South