Frederick Douglass · 400 pages
Rating: (769 votes)
“How do you feel," said a friend to me, "when you are hooted and jeered on the street on account of your color?" "I feel as if an ass had kicked, but had hit nobody," was my answer.”
― Frederick Douglass, quote from Life and Times of Frederick Douglass
“Men who live by robbing their fellow men of their labor and liberty have forfeited their right to know anything of the thoughts, feelings, or purposes of those whom they rob and plunder. They have by the single act of slaveholding voluntarily placed themselves beyond the laws of justice and honor, and have become only fitted for companionship with thieves and pirates - the common enemies of God and of all mankind.”
― Frederick Douglass, quote from Life and Times of Frederick Douglass
“For no man who lives at all lives unto himself. He either helps or hinders all who are in anywise connected to him.”
― Frederick Douglass, quote from Life and Times of Frederick Douglass
“He was whipped oftener who was whipped easiest.”
― Frederick Douglass, quote from Life and Times of Frederick Douglass
“none to molest them or make them afraid.”
― Frederick Douglass, quote from Life and Times of Frederick Douglass
“A man’s troubles are always half disposed of when he finds endurance the only alternative.”
― Frederick Douglass, quote from Life and Times of Frederick Douglass
“There is something divine in mindless beauty.”
― Albert Camus, quote from A Happy Death
“You’re not as cold as you pretend to be,’ she said. ‘I think your doors open in different places, that’s all. Most people just don’t know how to get in to you. They knock and they knock where the door is supposed to be, but it’s a blank wall. But you’re there. I’ve watched you. I’ve seen you do some awfully cold things warmly and some warm things coldly. Or does that make sense?”
― Evan S. Connell, quote from Mrs. Bridge
“Imagine this: Take your problems, all of them, from the tiniest, annoying concerns to the most horrific, difficult challenges, and put all those problems into a brown paper bag. Then imagine if everyone else in the world took all their problems and put them into their own paper bags. Think of how many bags there would be, all piled up into one gigantic mountain of brown paper. If you were told you could pick any bag of problems and take it home with you, do you think you'd want someone else's problems? I don't think so. You'd be scampering like crazy to find your own bag in that mountain of brown paper.”
― quote from The Faith Club: A Muslim, A Christian, A Jew--Three Women Search for Understanding
“We lie under the sheet
after making love, speaking
of loneliness
relieved in a book
relived in a book
so on that page
the clot and fissure
of it appears
words of a man
in pain
a naked word
entering the clot
a hand grasping
through bars:
deliverance
What happens between us
has happened for centuries
we know it from literature
still it happens
sexual jealousy
outflung hand
beating bed
dryness of mouth
after panting
there are books that describe all this
and they are useless”
― Adrienne Rich, quote from The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New, 1950-1984
“My mate Karl once told me he’d been looking after this five-year-old boy who – not knowing enough to have an ironic inflection to his words – said, ‘I want something.’ He didn’t know what it was. Not ‘I want sweets’, or ‘a can of Coke’, or ‘to watch the Tweenies’, or whatever it is they’re into now (I like Bagpuss), but ‘I want something.’ All of us, I think, have that feeling. And what heroin does when you first start taking it is tell you what that something is.”
― Russell Brand, quote from My Booky Wook
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