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Thursday, September 24, 2009

Favorite quotes

We are reading portions of the book "Incidents in the life of a Slave Girl" by Harriet Jacobs in US History.  It has some of the most amazing lines of any book I have read and was written by an escaped slave in the 1850's.  Here are a few of the lines that have so much meaning and emotion:

...The slave child had no thought of the morrow; but there came that blight, which too surely waits on every human being born to be a slave.

...These God-breathing machines are no more, in the sight of their masters, than the cotton they plant, or the horses they tend.

...The laugh of the little slave children sounded harsh and cruel.

...The poor black woman had but one child, whose eyes she saw closing in death, while she thanked God for taking her away from the greater bitterness of life.

...Every where the years bring to all enough of sin and sorrow; but in slavery the very dawn of life is darkened by these shadows.

...If God has bestowed beauty upon her, it will prove her greatest curse.

...I would ten thousand times rather that my children should be the half-starved paupers of Ireland than to be among the most pampered among the slaves of America.

... Why does the slave ever love?  Why allow the tendrils of the heart to twine around objects which may at any moment be wresched away by the hand of violence? 

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