Home is a place not only of strong affections, but of entire unreserve; it is life's undress rehearsal, its backroom, its dressing room, from which w… - Harriet Beecher Stowe

Mr. Wilson, you have a country; but what country have I, or any one like me, born of slave mothers? What laws are there for us? We don’t make them, — we don’t consent to them, — we have nothing to do with them; all they do for us is to crush us, and keep us down.

Once in an age God sends to some of us a friend who loves in us, not a false-imagining, an unreal character, but looking through the rubbish of our imperfections, loves in us the divine ideal of our nature, — loves, not the man that we are, but the angel that we may be.

But at midnight — strange, mystic hour, when the veil between the frail present and the eternal future grows thin — then came the messenger.