Quotes from Wench

Dolen Perkins-Valdez ·  290 pages

Rating: (14.3K votes)


“My children ain’t the only thing I love. If I was allowed, I reckon I’d love myself, too.”
― Dolen Perkins-Valdez, quote from Wench


“At night, before she went to sleep in her cabin down in the quarters, she remembered Mawu’s story and told herself that she was a god, a powerful god. Each and every day, she reminded herself of this so that she wouldn’t fall backward. She was more than eyes, ears, lips, and thigh. She was a heart. She was a mind”
― Dolen Perkins-Valdez, quote from Wench


“The woman had told the truth. The flowers were the color of sunset. And not the yellowish tinge of a lazy sun either, but the intense orange of a sun refusing to set on anyone else’s terms.”
― Dolen Perkins-Valdez, quote from Wench


“Mawu felt her face where the still-fresh scar had just been opened up again. She examined the blood on her fingers as if it weren’t her own. Sir returned to the table and a servant slipped through the side door and passed him a wet cloth to wipe the blood from his hands.”
― Dolen Perkins-Valdez, quote from Wench


“plans if you were going to go with this woman? come here.”
― Dolen Perkins-Valdez, quote from Wench



“Sweet allowed her pregnancy to get the better of her and simply sat down. Reenie’s lips set into a straight, emotionless line. Mawu no longer talked back, the words she did speak taking on an air of vapidity. Philip was chained at night, no longer trusted. So it was no wonder that Lizzie sought out the white woman then.”
― Dolen Perkins-Valdez, quote from Wench


“What is the denunciation with which we are charged? It is endeavoring, in our faltering human speech, to declare the enormity of the sin of making merchandise of men,—of separating husband and wife,—taking the infant from its mother, and selling the daughter to prostitution,—of a professedly Christian nation denying, by statute, the Bible to every sixth man and woman of its population, and making it illegal for ‘two or three’ to meet together, except a white man be present! What is this harsh criticism of motives with which we are charged?”
― Dolen Perkins-Valdez, quote from Wench


About the author

Dolen Perkins-Valdez
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Popular quotes

“Encircled by the social thoughts of Christmas-time, still let the benignant figure of my childhood stand unchanged! In every cheerful image and suggestion that the season brings, may the bright star that rested above the poor roof, be the star of all the Christian World! A moment’s pause, O vanishing tree, of which the lower boughs are dark to me as yet, and let me look once more! I know there are blank spaces on thy branches, where eyes that I have loved have shone and smiled; from which they are departed. But, far above, I see the raiser of the dead girl, and the Widow’s Son; and God is good! If Age be hiding for me in the unseen portion of thy downward growth, O may I, with a grey head, turn a child’s heart to that figure yet, and a child’s trustfulness and confidence! Now, the tree is decorated with bright merriment, and song, and dance, and cheerfulness. And they are welcome. Innocent and welcome be they ever held, beneath the branches of the Christmas Tree, which cast no gloomy shadow! But, as it sinks into the ground, I hear a whisper going through the leaves. “This, in commemoration of the law of love and kindness, mercy and compassion. This, in remembrance of Me!”
― Charles Dickens, quote from A Christmas Carol, The Chimes and The Cricket on the Hearth


“But there is another realm where we can always find something true, the fireside of a friend, where we shed our little conceits and find warmth and understanding, where small selfishnesses are impossible and where wine and books and talk give a different meaning to existence.
There we have made something that no falseness can touch. We are at home.”
― Kathrine Kressmann Taylor, quote from Address Unknown


“Но все же во мне живет безумная надежда. Снисходительно посмеиваюсь сама над собой. Ребенком я так же упрямо надеялась, что никогда не умру. Надежда представляется мне слепым кротом, он живет во мне и лелеет безумные планы. Не в силах прогнать его, я вынуждена с ним примириться.”
― Marlen Haushofer, quote from The Wall


“Anger is simply momentary madness, and sometimes there is strength in silence. After all, he is only throwing words, not stones.”
― Jeff Shaara, quote from Rise to Rebellion


“He's a force of nature. The wind would carry me right back to him.”
― J.M. Darhower, quote from Monster in His Eyes


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