Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [622]

“No. But later when I figured out how stupid I’d been, I was just glad he was so strict. And back when it happened, I was just glad he didn’t quite kill me.” — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 622

Note

The sentence slides from revisionist gratitude to the bare original fact in a single breath — ‘glad he was so strict’ corrected by ‘glad he didn’t quite kill me’ — and the two ‘glad’s sit so close together that the second one exposes the first as a story she told herself later. The understatement (‘didn’t quite’) does the work a scream would not.