Harriet Ann Jacobs Quotes

There are no bonds so strong as those which are formed by suffering together

The beautiful spring came; and when Nature resumes her loveliness, the human soul is apt to revive also.

There are wrongs which even the grave does not bury.

When they told me my new-born babe was a girl, my heart was heavier than it had ever been before. Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women.

Cruelty is contagious in uncivilized communities.

My master had power and law on his side; I had a determined will. There is might in each.

No pen can give an adequate description of the all-pervading corruption produced by slavery.

The degradation, the wrongs, the vices, that grow out of slavery, are more than I can describe. They are greater than you would willingly believe.

Hot weather brings out snakes and slaveholders, and I like one class of the venomous creatures as little as I do the other.

I would rather drudge out my life on a cotton plantation, till the grave opened to give me rest, than to live with an unprincipled master and a jealous mistress.

Lives that flash in sunshine, and lives that are born in tears, receive their hue from circumstances.

The war of my life had begun; and though one of God's most powerless creatures, I resolved never to be conquered.

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

Always it gave me a pang that my children had no lawful claim to a name.

For years, my master had done his utmost to pollute my mind with foul images, and to destroy the pure principles inculcated by my grandmother, and the good mistress of my childhood

There is something akin to freedom in having a lover who has no control over you, except that which he gains by kindness and attachment.

There must be sophistry in all this; but the condition of a slave confuses all principles of morality, and, in fact, renders the practice of them impossible.

Death is better than slavery.

I WAS born a slave; but I never knew it till six years of happy childhood had passed away

But I now entered on my fifteenth year - a sad epoch in the life of a slave girl. My master began to whisper foul words in my ear. Young as I was, I could not remain ignorant of their import

The slave girl is reared in an atmosphere of licentiousness and fear.

If a slave is unwilling to go with his new master, he is whipped, or locked up in jail, until he consents to go, and promises not to run away during the year.

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

When I was nearly twelve years old, my kind mistress sickened and died.

When my babe was born, they said it was premature. It weighed only four pounds; but God let it live.

DURING the first years of my service in Dr. Flint's family, I was accustomed to share some indulgences with the children of my mistress

When I was six years old, my mother died; and then, for the first time, I learned, by the talk around me, that I was a slave.

Southern women often marry a man knowing that he is the father of many little slaves. They do not trouble themselves about it.

Dr. Flint had sworn that he would make me suffer, to my last day, for this new crime against him, as he called it; and as long as he had me in his power he kept his word

The secrets of slavery are concealed like those of the Inquisition.

But I now entered on my fifteenth year - a sad epoch in the life of a slave girl. My master began to whisper foul words in my ear. Young as I was, I could not remain ignorant of their import.