Slave Quotes (page 16)
O, to be a ruler of life-- not a slave, To meet life as a powerful conqueror, No fumes-- no ennui-- no more complaints or scornful criticisms. O me repellent and ugly, O to these proud laws of the air, the water and the ground, proving my interior Soul impregnable, And nothing exterior shall ever take command of me.
Walt Whitman
In trying to make the slave experience intimate, I hoped the sense of things being both under control and out of control would be persuasive throughout; that the order and quietitude of every day life would be violently disrupted by the chaos of the needy dead; that the herculean effort to forget would be threatened by memory desperate to stay alive. To render enslavement as a personal experience, language must first get out of the way.
Toni Morrison
All was over in a moment. I had fulfilled my destiny. I was a captive and a slave. I loved Dora Spenlow to distraction! She was more than human to me. She was a Fairy, a Sylph, I don't know what she was - anything that no one ever saw, and everything that everybody ever wanted. I was swallowed up in an abyss of love in an instant. There was no pausing on the brink; no looking down, or looking back; I was gone, headlong, before I had sense to say a word to her.
Charles Dickens
Pirate Captain Jim"Walk the plank," says Pirate Jim"But Captain Jim, I cannot swim."Then you must steer us through the gale."But Captain Jim, I cannot sail."Then down with the galley slaves you go."But Captain Jim, I cannot row."Then you must be the pirate's clerk."But Captain Jim, I cannot work.
Shel Silverstein
A knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats; abase, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; alily-livered, action-taking knave, a whoreson, glass-gazing, super-serviceable finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be abawd, in way of good service, and art nothing butthe composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pandar, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch: one whom Iwill beat into clamorous whining, if thou deniestthe least...
William Shakespeare