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Kindred

Book by Octavia E. Butler · 23 quotes · Inequality, Kindred, Freedom

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Kindred Quotes

“He moved uncomfortably. "Reading's too much trouble. Mr. Jennings said I was too stupid to learn anyway." "Who's Mr. Jennings?" "He's the schoolmaster." "Is he?" I shook my head in disgust. "He shouldn't be. Listen, do you think you're stupid?" "No." A small hesitant no. "But I read as good as Daddy does already. Why should I have to do more than that?" "You don't have to. You can stay just the way you are. Of course, that would give Mr. Jennings the satisfaction of thinking he was right about you.”

“Then, somehow, I got caught up in one of Kevin's World War II books - a book of excerpts from the recollections of concentration camp survivors. Stories of beatings, starvation, filth, disease, torture, every possible degradation. As though the Germans had been trying to do in only a few years what the Americans had worked at for nearly two hundred. ... Like the Nazis, antebellum whites had known quite a bit about torture - quite a bit more than I ever wanted to learn.”

“We were both failures, she and I. We'd both run and been brought back, she in days, I in only hours. I probably knew more than she did about the general layout of the Eastern Shore. She knew only the area she'd been born and raised in, and she couldn't read a map. I knew about towns and rivers miles away― and it hadn't done me a damn bit of good! What had Weylin said? That educated didn't mean smart. He had a point. Nothing in my education or knowledge of the future had helped me to escape. Yet in a few years an illiterate runaway named Harriet Tubman would make nineteen trips into this country and lead three hundred fugitives to freedom.”