The Known World Quotes

“We are all worthy of one another.”
― Edward P. Jones, The Known World

“The hitter can never be the judge. Only the receiver of the blow can tell you how hard it was, whether it would kill a man or make a baby just yawn.”
― Edward P. Jones, The Known World

“A woman, no matter the age, is always learning, always becoming. But a man . . . stops learning at fourteen or so.”
― Edward P. Jones, The Known World

“A man does not learn very well, Mr. Robbins. Women, yes, because they are used to bending with whatever wind comes along. A woman, no matter the age, is always learning, always becoming. But a man, if you will pardon me, stops learning at fourteen or so. He shuts it all down, Mr. Robbins. A log is capable of learning more than a man. To teach a man would be a battle, a war, and I would lose.”
― Edward P. Jones, The Known World

“Whenever people in that part of the world asked Patterson about the wonders of America, the possibilities and the hope of America, Patterson would say that it was a good and fine place but all the Americans were running it into the ground and that it would be a far better place if it had no Americans.”
― Edward P. Jones, The Known World

“Calvin had long been uneasy in his own person and so lived to put everyone else at ease.”
― Edward P. Jones, The Known World

“You too heavy a man for me to carry...I done carried heavy men and I know how they can break your back. I ain’t got but this one back and I don’t want it broke again...”
― Edward P. Jones, The Known World

“God is in his heaven and he don't care most of the time. The trick of life is to know when God does care and do all you need to do behind his back.”
― Edward P. Jones, The Known World

“When Augustus Townsend died in Georgia near the Florida line, he rose up above the barn where he had died, up above the trees and the crumbling smokehouse and the little family house nearby, and he walked away quick-like, toward Virginia. He discovered that when people were above it all they walked faster, as much as a hundred times faster than when they were confined to the earth. And so he reached Virginia in little or no time. He came to the house he had built for his family, for Mildred his wife and Henry his son, and he opened and went through the door. He thought she might be at the kitchen table, unable to sleep and drinking something to ease her mind. But he did not find his wife there. Augustus went upstairs and found Mildred sleeping in their bed. He looked at her for a long time, certainly as long as it would have taken him, walking up above it all, to walk to Canada and beyond. Then he went to the bed, leaned over and kissed her left breast.
The kiss went through the breast, through skin and bone, and came to the cage that protected the heart. Now the kiss, like so many kisses, had all manner ofkeys, but it, like so many kisses, was forgetful, and it could not find the right key to the cage. So in the end, frustrated, desperate, the kiss squeezed through the bars and kissed Mildred’s heart. She woke immediately and she knew her husband was gone forever. All breath went and she was seized with such a pain that she had to come to her feet. But the room and the house were not big enough to contain her pain and she stumbled out ofthe room, out and down the stairs, out through the door that Augustus, as usual, had left open. The dog watched her from the hearth. Only in the yard could she begin to breathe again. And breath brought tears. She fell to her knees, out in the open yard, in her nightclothes, something Augustus would not have approved of. Augustus died on Wednesday.”
― Edward P. Jones, The Known World

“[He] went on to tell her that certain work songs made the work a little easier, but that there were others, depending upon the time of day, that dragged a body down, so 'you just gotta be careful with your songs and your hummin' and whatnot.”
― Edward P. Jones, The Known World

“But where, in all she taught her son, was it about thou shall own no one, havin been owned once your own self. Don’t go back to Egypt after God done took you outa there.”
― Edward P. Jones, The Known World

“Priscilla watched her husband as he slowly drifted into sleep, and once he was asleep, she took hold of his hand and put it to her face and smelled all of the outside world that he had brought in with him and then she tried to find sleep herself.”
― Edward P. Jones, The Known World

“His oldest child from his second marriage, Matthew, stayed up all the night before he was buried, putting his father’s history on a wooden tombstone. He began with his father’s name on the first line, and on the next, he put the years ofhis father’s coming and going. Then all the things he knew his father had been. Husband. Father. Farmer. Grandfather. Patroller. Tobacco Man. Tree Maker. The letters ofthe words got smaller and smaller as the boy, not quite twelve, neared the bottom ofthe wood because he had never made a headstone for anyone before so he had not compensated for all that he would have to put on it. The boy filled up the whole piece ofwood and at the end of the last line he put a period. His father’s grave would remain, but the wooden marker would not last out the year. The boy knew better than to put a period at the end ofsuch a sentence. Something that was not even a true and proper sentence, with subject aplenty, but no verb to pull it all together. A sentence, Matthew’s teacher back in Virginia had tried to drum into his thick Kinsey head, could live without a subject, but it could not live without a verb.”
― Edward P. Jones, The Known World

“Augustus wasn’t driving the wagon very fast because he had his family together again and all time was now spread out before him over the valley and the mountains forever and ever.”
― Edward P. Jones, The Known World

“He knew he was going to die but he thought this little thing might provide him with a nothing stool way off in the corner of heaven reserved for fools, people too stupid to come out of the rain. People got to that corner by heaven's back door.”
― Edward P. Jones, The Known World

“She went through her memory for the time, for the day, she and and her husband told him all about what he should and should not do. No goin out into them woods without Papa or me knowin about it. No steppin foot out this house without them free papers, not even to go to the well or the privy. Say your prayers every night...Pick the blueberries close to the ground, son. Them the sweetest, I find. If a white man say the trees can talk, can dance, you just say yes right along, that you done seen em do it plenty of times. Don't look them people in the eye. You see a white woman riding toward you, get way off the road and go stand behind a tree. The uglier the white woman, the farther you go and the broader the tree. But where, in all she taught her son, was it about thou shall own no one, havin been owned once your own self. Don't go back to Egypt after God done took you outa there.”
― Edward P. Jones, The Known World

“It mattered not how long he had wandered in the wilderness, how long they had kept him in chains, how long he had helped them and kept himself in his own chains; none of that mattered now. He patted the baby’s back, turned around and went back to the Richmond Home for Colored Orphans. No, it did not matter. It mattered only that those kind of chains were gone and that he had crawled out into the clearing and was able to stand up on his hind legs and look around and appreciate the difference between then and now, even on the awful Richmond days when the now came dressed as the then.”
― Edward P. Jones, The Known World

“But he was a free and clear man, and the law said so. Augustus never hurt me, never said bad to me. What Harvey done was wrong. But tellin you don’t put me on the nigger side. I’m still on the white man side, John. I’m still standin with the white. God help me if you believe somethin else about me.”
― Edward P. Jones, The Known World

“Most crimes and misdemeanors by slaves were dealt with by their masters; they could even hang a slave if he killed another slave, but that would have been like throwing money down a well after the slave had already thrown the first load of money down, as William Robbins once told Skiffington.”
― Edward P. Jones, The Known World

“Henry had been a good master, his widow decided, as good as they come. Yes, he sometimes had to ration the food he gave them. But that was not his fault—had God sent down more food, Henry would certainly have given it to them. Henry was only the middleman in that particular transaction. Yes, he had to have some slaves beaten, but those were the ones who would not do what was right and proper. Spare the rod . . . , the Bible warned. Her husband had done the best he could, and on Judgment Day his slaves would stand before God and testify to that fact.”
― Edward P. Jones, The Known World

“Moses had thought that it was already a strange world that made him a slave to a white man, but God had indeed set it twirling and twisting every which way when he put black people to owning their own kind. Was God even up there attending to business anymore?”
― Edward P. Jones, The Known World

“A few women had cried, remembering the way Henry smiled or how he would join them in singing or thinking that the death ofanyone, good or bad, master or not, cut down one more tree in the life forest that shielded them from their own death; but most said or did nothing.”
― Edward P. Jones, The Known World

“The kiss went through the breast, through skin and bone, and came to the cage that protected the heart. Now the kiss, like so many kisses, had all manner of keys, but it, like so many kisses, was forgetful, and it could not find the right key to the cage. So in the end, frustrated, desperate, the kiss squeezed through the bars and kissed Mildred's heart. She woke immediately and she knew her husband was gone forever. All breath went and she was seized with such a pain that she had to come to her feet.”
― Edward P. Jones, The Known World

“I wanted to tell you somethin, and I have been workin my mind so the words will tumble out in a straight line. You know how that can be, John."

"I do, Barnum. Just set them words one by one and they'll do fine and we'll get where we got to go.”
― Edward P. Jones, The Known World

“Render your body to them" his father had taught, "but know your soul belongs to God.”
― Edward P. Jones, The Known World

“His droning on and on was a bit soothing, far more than Calvin’s hand on her arm or the children’s smiling up at her. His talking told her in some odd way that one day the pain would at least be cut in half.”
― Edward P. Jones, The Known World

“Without all that young stuff, Stamford, you will die a slave. And it will not be a pretty die.”
― Edward P. Jones, The Known World

“Best hurry, he thought. Best get outa this weather. He wanted to die but he really didn't want to catch a cold to do it.”
― Edward P. Jones, The Known World

“I never thought I was worthy of you,” he said, thinking of the dead Henry, when he asked her to marry him. She said, “We are all worthy of one another.”
― Edward P. Jones, The Known World

“Before freedom she had known only slave food, plenty of fatback and ash cakes and the occasional mouthful of rape or kale.”
― Edward P. Jones, The Known World