Top 29 Harriet Ann Jacobs Quotes
#1. I WAS born a slave; but I never knew it till six years of happy childhood had passed away.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
#2. But to the slave mother New Year's day comes laden with peculiar sorrows. She sits on her cold cabin floor, watching the children who may all be torn from her the next morning; and often does she wish that she and they might die before the day dawns.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
#3. 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.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
#4. 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.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
#5. Southern women often marry a man knowing that he is the father of many little slaves. They do not trouble themselves about it.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
#6. 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.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
#7. If you want to be fully convinced of the abominations of slavery, go on a southern plantation, and call yourself a negro trader. Then there will be no concealment; and you will see and hear things that will seem to you impossible among human beings with immortal souls.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
#8. 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.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
#9. 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.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
#10. There are no bonds so strong as those which are formed by suffering together
Harriet Ann Jacobs
#11. The beautiful spring came; and when Nature resumes her loveliness, the human soul is apt to revive also.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
#12. 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.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
#13. Lives that flash in sunshine, and lives that are born in tears, receive their hue from circumstances.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
#15. No pen can give an adequate description of the all-pervading corruption produced by slavery.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
#16. 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.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
#17. The slave girl is reared in an atmosphere of licentiousness and fear.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
#18. 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.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
#19. Hot weather brings out snakes and slaveholders, and I like one class of the venomous creatures as little as I do the other.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
#20. 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.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
#21. 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.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
#22. 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.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
#23. When I was nearly twelve years old, my kind mistress sickened and died.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
#24. 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.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
#25. The secrets of slavery are concealed like those of the Inquisition.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
#26. Always it gave me a pang that my children had no lawful claim to a name.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
#28. Notwithstanding my grandmother's long and faithful service to her owners, not one of her children escaped the auction block. These God-breathing machines are no more, in the sight of their masters, than the cotton they plant, or the horses they tend.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
#29. When my babe was born, they said it was premature. It weighed only four pounds; but God let it live.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
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