Kindred Quotes

“I thought of the sleeping pills in my bag and wondered just how great a hypocrite I was. It was so easy to advise other people to live with their pain.”

“Better to stay alive,” I said. “At least while there’s a chance to get free.”

“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.”

“As a kind of castaway myself, I was happy to escape into the fictional world of someone else’s trouble.”

“...I realized that I knew less about loneliness than I had thought - and much less than I would know when he went away.”

“But I would help him as best I could. And I would try to keep friendship with him, maybe plant a few ideas in his mind that would help both me and the people who would be his slaves in the years to come. I might even be making things easier for Alice.”

“We’re going to have to fit in as best we can with the people here for as long as we have to stay. That means we’re going to have to play the roles you gave us.”

“The place, the time would either kill him outright or mark him somehow.”

“Rufus had caused her trouble, and now he had been rewarded for it. It made no sense. No matter how kindly he treated her now that he had destroyed her, it made no sense.”

“The ease. Us, the children… I never realized how easily people could be trained to accept slavery”

“Then let’s go to Las Vegas and pretend we haven’t got any relatives.”

“Was I getting so used to being submissive?

“I remembered suddenly the way he used to talk to his mother. If he couldn’t get what he wanted from her gently, he stopped being gentle. Why not? She always forgave him. ”

“I remembered suddenly the way he used to talk to his mother. If he couldn’t get what he wanted from her gently, he stopped being gentle. Why not? She always forgave him. ”

“Slavery was a long slow process of dulling.”

“Tom Weylin had probably marked his son more than he knew with that whip.”

“Tom Weylin had probably marked his son more than he knew with that whip.”

“I remembered suddenly the way he used to talk to his mother. If he couldn’t get what he wanted from her gently, he stopped being gentle. Why not? She always forgave him. ”

“Tom Weylin had probably marked his son more than he knew with that whip.”

“Frankly, it never occurred to me that I needed someone who looked like me to show me the way. I was ignorant and arrogant and persistent and the writing left me no choice at all.”

“These people were my relatives, my ancestors. And this place could be my refuge.”