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.

Cruelty is contagious in uncivilized communities.

There is something akin to freedom in having a lover who has no control over you, except that which he gains by kindness and attachment.

I can testify, from my own experience and observation, that slavery is a curse to the whites as well as to the blacks. It makes the white fathers cruel and sensual; the sons violent and licentious; it contaminates the daughters, and makes the wives wretched. And as for the colored race, it needs an abler pen than mine to describe the extremity of their sufferings, the depth of their degradation.

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

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.

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