Important Quotations Explained
1. [A]nd so you needn't let that slightly funny feeling you have from
time to time about exploitation, oppression, domination develop into
full-fledged unease, discomfort; you could ruin your holiday.
2. Do you ever try to understand why people like me cannot get over
the past, cannot forgive and cannot forget? There is the Barclay's Bank. The
Barclay brothers are dead. The human beings they traded, the human beings
who to them were only commodities, are dead. . . . So do you see the queer
thing about people like me? Sometimes we hold your retribution.
3. I[I]f you could hear the sound of [the old library's] quietness .
. . , the smell of the sea . . . , the heat of the sun . . . , the beauty of
us sitting there like communicants at an altar . . . , the fairy tale of how
we met you, your right to do the things you did . . . you would see why my
heart would break at the dung heap that now passes for a library in
Antigua.
4. Antigua is a small place. Antigua is a very small place. In
Antigua, not only is the event turned into everyday, but the everyday is
turned into an event.
5. It is as if, then, the beauty—the beauty of the sea, the land, the
air, the trees, the market, the people, the sounds they make—were a prison,
and as if everything and everybody inside it were locked in and everything
and everybody that is not inside it were locked out. And what might it do to
ordinary people to live in this way every day? What might it do to them to
live in such heightened, intense surroundings every day?
