Top 15 Marie Vieux-Chauvet Quotes

Cruelty is contagious

The volcano, which for long years the planters did not believe existed, was erupting. (chapter XXXV p473)

During these days of turmoil, there were more runaway slaves than ever. The constabulary was dog-tired, for not an hour went by where some slave was not brought back in chains, caught mid-flight. Tipped off to what was going on by the domestic slaves, the slaves in the workhouses listened attentively to those words Liberty and Equality, which a bunch of white people, rising up before the whole world, had written in their own blood. (chapter XXIX, p418)

The eyes, if one knows them well, rarely lie (chapter XXII, p342)

A white public had put her on a pedestal, and from that pedestal she looked down and saw everything unmasked. And what she saw was horrific. It was a shame. (chapter XII, p175)

Minette pushed away her plate and stood up. What she wouldn't have given to be alone for a moment, just a moment. Oh, to have a room of my own, to be able to close myself up somewhere to think and to cry as much as I want! she thought to herself. (chapter IX, p120)

In Saint-Martin's voice she had sensed the stirrings of a different version of the same revolt Joseph had revealed to her that one night. The Whites could also suffer the injustice of the Law! She remembered Joseph explaining to her that the planters' greatest enemies were the poor whites. Discontent, hatred, and revolt thus existed on a human scale and not only within the black race, despised and enslaved? (chapter XII, p94)

At twelve, she already understood many things. She accepted them as inevitable, yet questioned them all the same. Why? Why were things this way and not another? Why were some people rich and others poor? Why did people beat their slaves? Why were some masters kind and others cruel, some priests good and others evil? Why did catechism teach the things it did and why did the priests act the way they did? They said: we are all brothers, but then they bought slaves and beat or otherwise tortured them. Why should she have to hide herself in order to learn to read? Why had Rosélia, one of the neighborhood vendors, been imprisoned for hiding a runaway slave? And above all, why - knowing what could happen - had she hidden that slave, who she did not even know? (chapter I, p17)

At dawn, I was already flat against the wall, drinking up the least signs of life from the town like a starving man. Nothing stirred. All around, immutable nature seemed to mock our anguish.

It is with my hand and with my heart that I write, not with my eyes

What’s the use of religion if it oppresses instead of consoling? If it offers despair instead of relief? If it takes away instead of preserving?

I am afraid to face the fact that, no matter what you do, man is a wolf to man. More than anyone else I know, I have the desire to stand firm and fight for a good cause. But not with weapons. With my ideas. My hand extended in brotherhood, offering a fresh and sober example. I would follow anyone who passed austerity laws to halt run-way decadence and the vanity of unchecked ambition; I would support whoever could abolish hunger and poverty, prison cells and torture, who would treat every man as a man and include everyone in the national dialogue. If I decide not to belong to any party, if I wish to remain free, then let that choice be mine. Alone and unarmed, I want the right to plead for justice and freedom and to shout from the rooftops that which I believe to be the truth... (chapter 13)

Nothing would stop her from doing something, even if it killed her. Doing something for absolutely no reason, perhaps, but still doing something, such is what life demands from human beings. Faint whiffs of hope would stir up illusions she had thought quite dead. So this is what helps, she told herself as she walked. So this is why suicide cannot be the normal culmination of a human life. I am going to try to do something. I'm going to try to believe that I can still make myself useful. She looked at the sky, the trees, the flowers, the people, as if she were seeing them for the first time. She opened her handbag and put money in the hands of beggars; confronted with a skeletal mother and her four starving, crying babies, she took stock of her own sufferings and found them acceptable. (chapter 12)

When she came out, pure and beautiful in her immaculate smock, all that weighed on his heart seemed to melt. She exists, you simply have to remind yourself that such women exist in order to reconcile yourself with life, he told himself. (Chapter 10)

Alone again, she had invented touchingly naïve myths to console herself: a leaf whirling in the wind, a butterfly whether black or alive with color, the hooting of an owl or the graceful song of a nightingale, everything seemed pregnant with meaning. (chapter 8)