The Kingdom on the Waves
M.T. Anderson
Top 10 Best Quotes
“We all flee in hope of finding some ground of security”
“Those accustomed to failure fear the novelty of success. Those taught the lessons of subordination are oft timid in the school of self-service.”
“In all things we become acclimated; this is our strength in wartime, and also our weakness. What is a principle, if it alter with circumstance? But what is a man, if he cannot change to meet changed times? And if he can change to meet changed times, is he a man, or several in succession?”
“This is the war where we change. This is the trickster war. It's where we disappear, just like they desire us disappear. I spoke it you before: They wish us blank," he said, gesturing without thinking at Dr. Trefusis, who was the nearest exemplar of the white race. "They want us with no history and no memory. They want us empty as paper so they can write on us, so we ain't nothing but a price and an owner's name and a list of tasks. And that's what we'll give them. We'll give them your Nothing. We'll give them my William Williams and Henry Henry. We'll slip through and we'll change to who we must needs be and I will be all sly and have my delightful picaresque japes. But at the end of it, when it's over, I shall be one thing. I shall be one man, fixed, and not have to take no other name. I shall be one person steadily for some years." "This is why we got to win...If we ever wish to be one person, we got to win.”
“Altruism is the kind of pie best eaten with a lot of gravy and little inspection of the kind of kidney it's stuffed with.”
“There are some who believe that the mind is a blank tablet, on which experience is writ until the page be full, and the cryptic world is known; but I see rather that my own life hath been one long forgetting, the erasure of what was drawn, a terrible redaction; til all that remains is blank white and comfortless. I know not what we have been; I know not what we are; but I know what we might be. And so I light out for the unknown regions.”
“I hope thou shalt never retreat beneath the ground. The sun is thy inheritance. The sky is thy birthright. Stay here, my boy, and with the conversation of mankind. rejoice in the light.”
“We ain't anything more than a name and some likes and some distastes, and a story we tell about ourselves.' And what others say about us.”
“We ain't anything more than a name and some likes and some distastes and a story we tell about ourselves.' 'And what others say about us.' 'If you want them stories heaped in, too, then you're welcome to them. And we're a body; and sometimes the stories and the name, they live on after the body.”
“To participate, then, in the pomp of the orchestra, in the full scintillation thereof, was in the highest degree thrilling. Is this not the image of the perfect republic -- each instrument singing its wonted melody, endeavoring at once to express its part, and, in the same instance to conform its voice to the conversation of the whole?”
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Book Keywords:
running-away, security, hope, life, slaves, makind, forgetting, revolutionary-war, rejoice, fleeing, mind
