Most Important Quotes
The Empathy of the Horseman
"He came to believe that horses lived with a world of fear, and when you grasped that, you had a clear idea how to be with them."
Speaker: Narrator (about Jarret) | Context: Warfield’s Jarret, 1850; early scenes trace Jarret Lewis's boyhood apprenticeship in the stables and his intuitive grasp of equine behavior.
Analysis: This insight distills Jarret’s genius into one ethical principle: leadership through empathy rather than force. By centering fear as the horse’s baseline experience, the line critiques prevailing “breaking” techniques and aligns Jarret with the compassionate stewardship at the heart of The Human-Animal Bond. The sentence also mirrors Jarret’s own life under slavery, where constant threat shapes behavior, making his gentleness a radical moral choice. Stylistically, the plain diction and proverbial cadence give the statement the weight of hard-won wisdom, foreshadowing why only he can unlock Lexington’s greatness.
Art as a Window to Erased Histories
"Theo had never seen a painting depicting an enslaved person that emphasized his authority and agency in this way... Troye may have portrayed these men as individuals, but perhaps only in the same clinical way that he exactly documented the splendid musculature of the thoroughbred. It was impossible not to suspect some equivalence between the men and the horse: valued, no doubt, but living by the will of their enslaver... And while the horse had two names, the men had only one."
Speaker: Narrator (about Theo) | Context: Theo, Georgetown, 2019; Theo encounters Edward Troye’s painting at the Smithsonian and rethinks his thesis.
Analysis: The passage dramatizes the tension at the core of Art, History, and Memory: art can dignify and dehumanize at once. Troye’s precise individuation of the men threatens stereotype, yet the possessive naming—“Viley’s Harry”—reinscribes property relations, creating a chilling equivalence between men and horse. The juxtaposition of “two names” for the animal and one for the attendants exposes how taxonomy can become a tool of erasure. The scene catalyzes Theo’s pursuit of Hidden Histories and Erased Narratives, aligning visual analysis with moral archaeology and setting the novel’s investigative plot in motion.
The Unchanging Narrative of Systemic Racism
"At approximately 7:20 p.m., a uniformed patrol officer of the Fourth District interrupted an apparent assault on a Caucasian female jogger by a Black male... The suspect raised an object the officer believed was a firearm at which point the officer discharged his firearm one time, striking the suspect."
Speaker: Police Report | Context: Jess, Capitol Hill, 2019; after Theo’s disappearance, a reporter shows Jess the official account of the shooting.
Analysis: The sterile, procedural syntax enacts the violence it describes, laundering culpability through passive constructions and euphemism in a textbook example of Race, Slavery, and Systemic Racism. Phrases like “apparent assault,” “suspect,” and “discharged his firearm” turn a Good Samaritan into a threat while conferring institutional authority on the killer. The grim irony—Theo’s “object” is a cell phone—underscores how perception, not action, becomes the fatal evidence against a Black man. By echoing Jarret’s historical dehumanization in a contemporary key, the quote collapses centuries, insisting that the grammar of racism adapts but endures.
The Legacy of Art and Purpose
"Science hadn’t moved people. Maybe art could. Theo had certainly believed that. His whole life had been devoted to the proposition that art mattered, that it could change the way we understand the world."
Speaker: Narrator (about Jess) | Context: Jess, Los Angeles Airport, 2020; grieving, Jess considers a Tasmanian job articulating extinct-animal skeletons and recalls Theo’s credo.
Analysis: Jess’s reflection fuses method with meaning, completing the novel’s braid of scientific fact and humanistic interpretation through her memory of Theo. The shift from “science” to “art” signals not a renunciation but a synthesis: evidence needs narrative to move hearts. The spare, declarative rhythm reads like a credo, elevating the work with Lexington’s bones into an act of witness. In structural terms, the quote resolves the book’s dual timelines by transforming personal loss into a mission—using craft, aesthetic framing, and empathy to alter cultural understanding.
Thematic Quotes
Race, Slavery, and Systemic Racism
The Rules of the Game
"And here it is, what we wrote at that time, and what has been held to ever since: ‘No negro or mulatto, to make nomination in any stake, to be run over this course.’"
Speaker: Willa Viley | Context: Thomas J. Scott, 1853; at a dinner where Richard Ten Broeck maneuvers to secure Lexington, Viley brandishes racetrack bylaws to nullify Harry Lewis’s claim.
Analysis: Viley’s unruffled quotation weaponizes procedure, revealing how racism embeds itself in rules that look neutral while enforcing theft. The genteel setting intensifies the horror: exploitation is recast as etiquette, and plunder becomes policy. The circular phrase “what we wrote... held to ever since” exposes tradition as a self-justifying machine, exposing how systems reproduce themselves. As a plot engine, the moment precipitates the horse’s loss and Jarret’s sale, demonstrating how legal frameworks target Black prosperity precisely when it becomes visible.
The Burden of Knowing
"He just didn’t know how he needed to be if he was going to live in this country... We tried. Gave him ‘the talk,’ like our parents did when we were little kids... Sir Galahad was a White dude. Theo should’ve been with someone who would’ve kept reminding him. That’s all."
Speaker: Daniel | Context: Jess, Capitol Hill, 2019; Theo’s friend from Yale helps Jess clear the apartment and voices his fury and grief.
Analysis: Daniel’s lament names the psychological tax of survival: perpetual self-surveillance taught through “the talk,” a generational script for navigating danger. The shift from collective “we” to the intimate jab at “Sir Galahad” pinpoints how interracial intimacy can obscure life-or-death realities, even among allies. Bitter understatement—“That’s all”—heightens the pathos, compressing the impossible ask into a shrug of inevitability. The quote enlarges the book’s critique by showing systemic violence not only in events but in the constant, exhausting pedagogy imposed on Black lives.
Art, History, and Memory
The Mirror of a Man
"Here’s the ground of it, as I see it: a racehorse is a mirror, and a man sees his own reflection there... A gentleman likes to have a horse that gives the right answers to those questions, then he can believe that he will give the right answers too. To do my part, I have to give a man a likeness that shows not just how beautiful the horse looks, but how beautiful it feels to him."
Speaker: Thomas J. Scott | Context: Warfield’s Jarret, 1850; Scott explains to Jarret what patrons want from equestrian portraiture.
Analysis: Scott reframes portraiture as flattery with philosophical gloss: the horse becomes a reflective surface for masculine virtue and class aspiration. His emphasis on capturing how the horse “feels” to the owner extends mimesis into psychology, articulating art’s power to construct identity rather than simply depict it. The metaphor of the “mirror” anticipates the novel’s method, where images expose the anxieties and vanities of their age. This credo also seeds dramatic irony: the very paintings that prop up status will later help Theo read the past’s blind spots.
The Testimony of Bones
"It thrilled Jess to think that when she closed the drawer on a newly filed specimen, it might be opened in fifty or a hundred years by a scientist seeking answers to questions she didn’t yet know how to ask, using tools of analysis she couldn’t even yet imagine."
Speaker: Narrator (about Jess) | Context: Jess, Smithsonian Museum Support Center, 2019; a portrait of her vocation in osteo prep.
Analysis: The sentence telescopes time, positioning the collection as a long conversation where data outlives its gatherers—a scientific analogue to archival art. The future-facing wonder aligns Jess with historians like Theo, both committed to evidence as a bridge across centuries. Brooks’s syntax stretches forward—“didn’t yet know... couldn’t even yet imagine”—to evoke the thrill of discovery and the humility of working for unknown successors. The idea prepares us for Lexington’s skeleton to become not a relic but an instrument for reinterpreting the past.
The Human-Animal Bond
A New Promise
"That Darley foal. He makes me feel—hopeful. Like the future gone matter more than it did the day before he come."
Speaker: Jarret Lewis | Context: Warfield’s Jarret, 1850; after hearing Scott’s theory, Jarret names what the newborn colt stirs in him.
Analysis: For Jarret, the foal is not a mirror of status but a vessel of possibility, granting a boy treated as property a stake in tomorrow. The hesitant dash and dialect infuse the confession with vulnerability and authenticity, underscoring how feeling itself is dangerous under slavery. The horse becomes an antidote to nihilism, a living project through which Jarret can exercise skill and care. The line fixes the novel’s emotional axis: hope is a discipline, and it often arrives in nonhuman form.
The Cruelty of the Sport
"It’s just so cruel—and such a wicked, wicked waste... And all for what? So rich men can wave their dicks at each other?"
Speaker: Catherine | Context: Jess, Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, 2019; over dinner, a British equine vet explains why she left elite racing.
Analysis: Catherine’s bluntness punctures the romance of the turf, counterbalancing Lexington’s myth with the industry’s routine disposability. The repetition of “wicked” and the deliberately vulgar image collapse ceremony into crude competition, exposing the bodily cost paid by animals for human vanity. Her critique reframes the human-animal bond as a site of exploitation as well as love, complicating any easy nostalgia. The moment widens the novel’s moral lens, insisting that admiration for a champion must also account for the casualties the system produces.
Character-Defining Quotes
Jarret Lewis
"Miss Clay. I might as well be dead, if this"—he lifted both hands, palms upward, in a wide, all-encompassing shrug—"if this is how living gone be."
Speaker: Jarret Lewis | Context: Ten Broeck’s Jarret, 1853; facing Lexington’s sale, Jarret declares his intent to flee when Mary Barr Clay pleads with him.
Analysis: The gesture—hands lifted in totalizing surrender—turns Jarret’s body into punctuation, embodying despair transformed into resolve. Equating life without agency to death, he articulates the core of Freedom and Agency in a world designed to deny both. The moment marks his passage from quiet endurance to defiant self-authorship, with Lexington as the catalyst. Its emotional clarity gives the decision moral inevitability, defining the courage that shapes his fate.
Theo
"I don’t know who you are, but if I can find out, I will."
Speaker: Theo | Context: Theo, Georgetown, 2019; at closing time, he addresses the Black attendants in Troye’s painting of Richard Singleton.
Analysis: The vow is simple, almost whispered, yet it establishes Theo’s vocation: to return names and stories to those history has flattened. By speaking to figures in a painting, he collapses the distance between viewer and subject, treating art as a site of ethical responsibility rather than mere aesthetic pleasure. The future tense—“I will”—converts curiosity into promise, powering his investigation of Hidden Histories and Erased Narratives. It also signals his kinship with Jarret: both see individuals where others see property.
Jess
"Jess tried her best to explain that she’d dug up Milo because she loved him, and that’s why she had to see what his skeleton looked like. Beautiful, as she knew it would be: the swoop of the rib cage, the scoop of the eye sockets."
Speaker: Narrator (about Jess) | Context: Jess, Smithsonian Museum Support Center, 2019; a childhood memory frames her first chapter.
Analysis: The anecdote fuses affect and analysis, revealing Jess’s conviction that looking closely is a form of love. The lyrical assonance of “swoop” and “scoop” aestheticizes anatomy, showing how description can honor rather than desecrate the dead. Her instinct to understand structure anticipates her reverent work with Lexington’s remains, making her the ideal counterpart to Theo’s connoisseurship. The scene recalibrates “morbid” curiosity as devotion to truth and beauty.
Thomas J. Scott
"I’m a free labor man, always have been. But here’s the truth... If I were in purse to buy Warfield’s Jarret, I believe I would do it. And so we who think we are above enslaving our fellow man are corrupted."
Speaker: Thomas J. Scott | Context: Thomas J. Scott, 1852; in his diary, Scott confesses his susceptibility to the slave economy’s allure.
Analysis: The confession strips away moral self-flattery, acknowledging how proximity to power corrodes principle. The conditional—“If I were in purse”—lays bare the transactional logic that can make even professed abolitionists complicit. By staging the admission in a private diary, Brooks gives us unguarded candor, complicating Scott beyond hero or hypocrite. The result is a portrait of structural corruption: individuals don’t merely break rules; the rules reshape them.
Harry Lewis
"My way of thinking, a good horse has no color. It’s what’s inside that’s worth the fret."
Speaker: Harry Lewis | Context: Warfield’s Jarret, 1850; after Lexington’s birth, Harry reassures a superstitious Jarret about the colt’s white feet.
Analysis: On its surface, the line rebukes stable lore in favor of temperament and heart, the true measures of a racer. Its double meaning quietly critiques racial judgment, imagining a world where essence overrules appearance. The homespun phrasing gives it proverbial heft, positioning Harry as both realist and moral compass. In Jarret’s ears, it becomes a creed for assessing horses and humans alike.
Memorable Lines
The Measure of a Champion
"After him there were merely other horses."
Speaker: Charles E. Trevathan (Epigraph) | Context: Epigraph; the turf historian’s pronouncement frames Lexington’s legend.
Analysis: The aphoristic finality elevates Lexington from exemplary to epochal, implying a before-and-after that reorganizes history. Its stark contrast—“him” versus “other horses”—compresses awe into a clean binary, the rhetoric of myth. By opening with hallowed praise, Brooks licenses the novel’s scale: multiple eras, disciplines, and obsessions orbit a single animal. The sentence primes readers to see the horse as both subject and symbol.
Opening and Closing Lines
Opening Line
"The deceptively reductive forms of the artist’s work belie the density of meaning forged by a bifurcated existence... No. Nup. That wouldn’t do. It reeked of PhD."
Speaker: Theo | Context: Theo, Georgetown, 2019; struggling to write for a general audience about Bill Traylor, born enslaved.
Analysis: The pivot from jargon to self-mockery establishes Theo as a bridge-builder trying to make scholarship speak plainly. The clipped refusals—“No. Nup.”—perform the very clarity he seeks, dramatizing a shift from theory to story. Thematically, the moment inaugurates the task of translating complex histories—of art, race, and memory—without flattening them. It also signals his eventual turn from abstraction toward a morally engaged, person-centered inquiry.
Closing Line
"Restless humans. You’d never stop them traveling."
Speaker: Narrator (about Jess) | Context: Jess, Los Angeles Airport, 2020; she boards a flight to Australia, brushing off a worry about a new virus.
Analysis: Dramatic irony reverberates—the reader knows COVID-19 will halt the world, contradicting her casual certainty. Yet the line also blesses Jess’s forward motion, affirming a human drive toward connection and purpose that animates the novel’s crossings of time and place. The plural “humans” widens her private departure into a species trait, while the colloquial cadence keeps it intimate. The ending balances hope with foreboding, leaving the story open to history’s next turn.