How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
"Consuela, my given name. Consuelo's a Mexican woman, a servant of servants, silent as clay. The woman who suffers. Who bears and endures. Then I'm Connie, who managed to get two years of college—till Consuela got pregnant. Connie got decent jobs from time to time and fought welfare for a little extra money for Angie. She got me on a bus when I had to leave Chicago. But it was her who married Eddie, she thought it was smart. Then I'm Conchita, the low-down drunken mean part of me who gets by in jail, in the bughouse, who loves no good men, who hurt my daughter…." (6.127)
Connie's fractured society makes her a fractured person. And those fractures are all about fault lines of race and class. (All this talk of split personalities also raises the possibility that Connie is Luciente, btw.)
Quote #5
We want there to be no chance of racism again. But we don't want the melting pot where everybody ends up with thin gruel. We want diversity, for strangeness breeds richness. (5.79)
One of the things you might worry about with a classless society is that it would be boring; everybody would be the same. But Mattapoisett is too cool for that; they make sure each village has a different base culture, so there are enough differences to keep things interesting. So they have an Ashkenazi Jewish culture in one village and a Wampanoag Indian culture in another village, and a Klingon culture in a third.
Quote #6
"All those meetings. I ended up with nothing but feeling sore and ripped off."
"You lose until you win—that's a saying those who changed our world left us. Poor people did get together." (8.156)
Luciente is saying that the perfect future was created by poor people organizing. Does that mean dropping poison in people's coffee? The book doesn't really explain how you get to the perfect future; it's a hope, but the actual blueprint to get to the hope is kind of fuzzy.