...I am ... one of the wretched and miserable daughters of the descendants of fallen Africa. Do you ask, why are you wretched and ...miserable? I reply, look at many of the most worthy and interesting of us doomed to spen our lives in gentlemen's kitchens. Look at our young men, smark, active and energetic, with souls filled with ambitious fire; if they can look forward, alas! what are their prospects? they can be nothing but the humblest laborers, on account of their dark complexions; hence many of them lose their ambition, and become worthless. Look at our middle-aged men, clad in their rusty plaids and coats; in winter, every cent they earn goes to buy their wood and pay their rents; their poor wives also toil beyond their strength, to help support their families. Look at our aged sires, whose heads are whitened with the frosts of seventy winters, with their old wood-saws on their backs. Alas, what keeps us so? Prejudice, ignorance, and poverty.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... we should be miserable but for the consciousness that we have done all in our power to help forward every measure for the free...dom and equality of the races and the sexes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... nothing seems completely to differentiate the poor but poverty. We find no adjectives to fit them, as a whole, only those of w...hich Want is the mother. "Miserable" covers many; "shabby" most, and I am sadly aware that, in a large majority of minds, "disagreeable" includes them all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
They wouldn't be heroes if they were infallible, in fact they wouldn't be heroes if they weren't miserable wretched dogs, the pari...ahs of the earth, besides which the only reason to build up an idol is to tear it down again.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle marry one another and so make only two people miserable instead of four, b...esides being very amusing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"Suppose they had saved up all my punishments?" she went on, talking more to herself than to the kitten. "What would they do at th...e end of a year? I should be sent to prison, I suppose, when the day came. Or--let me see--suppose each punishment was to be going without a dinner: then, when the miserable day came, I should have to go without fifty dinners at once! Well, I shouldn't mind that much! I'd far rather go without them than eat them!"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »