An Island Quotes

“That was when Meria could take no more. “Where is your freedom? What did independence bring you? Your generation brought us failure, nothing more. You should have done it properly. You should have obliterated it all, started from the beginning, and not simply tried to repeat what we had before. A corrupt elite, enslaving the poor. The poor must rise up. That is when you will have freedom, only then. Not this crippled existence of scrounging and scrounging and telling yourself that it is what you almost died for. This isn’t freedom, and no child of mine will be taught to think that this prison of exploitation is anything other than what it is.”
― Karen Jennings, An Island

“She was not the only one with that sentiment. Independence had not brought the things that had been promised. In fact, many people complained that they had less now than before.”
― Karen Jennings, An Island

“Who didn’t want to be more than they were, who didn’t want to rise up out of the dirt and be something?”
― Karen Jennings, An Island

“When they approached him again, made to hit him, he called out, told them what they wanted to know, gave them names and places, fabricating if he had no answer. The scarred man smirked. “Is this a man? The Dictator will laugh when he hears that this thing is meant to be his enemy.”
― Karen Jennings, An Island

“Overhead aeroplanes flew for days, their passengers fleeing the country’s independence. Already, in the capital, the president-elect had ordered a statue and a fountain, was drawing up plans for his new home. While down below, in the rubble, people were scrabbling as they had always done.”
― Karen Jennings, An Island

“We have been meek, all of us, and what has our meekness brought us? We have lost our land and ourselves. With meekness we accepted the West, took on all its values and ideals. So much so that we have grown to be ashamed of our own people. That is what the meek have inherited – shame!”
― Karen Jennings, An Island

“It’s happening in other countries,” someone was saying. “Why can’t we have our independence too?”
― Karen Jennings, An Island

“Only afterwards, in the first interrogation room, did he learn that the march had been poorly attended, with little more than two thousand people participating. The event had barely disrupted the peace, and though hundreds had died and many more were arrested, it had made no impact at all. There was nothing reported about it locally, nothing in the international press. And before too long the march became less than a myth, a mostly-forgotten rumour, too”
― Karen Jennings, An Island