Always it gave me a pang that my children had no lawful claim to a name.
- Harriet Ann Jacobs Quote

But to the slave mother New Year's day comes laden with peculiar sorrows. She sits on her cold cabin floor, watching the children who may all be torn from her the next morning; and often does she wish that she and they might die before the day dawns.
- Harriet Ann Jacobs Quote

Cruelty is contagious in uncivilized communities.
- Harriet Ann Jacobs Quote

DURING the first years of my service in Dr. Flint's family, I was accustomed to share some indulgences with the children of my mistress.
- Harriet Ann Jacobs Quote

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.
- Harriet Ann Jacobs Quote

I WAS born a slave; but I never knew it till six years of happy childhood had passed away.
- Harriet Ann Jacobs Quote

I would rather drudge out my life on a cotton plantation, till the grave opened to give me rest, than to live with an unprincipled master and a jealous mistress.
- Harriet Ann Jacobs Quote

If you want to be fully convinced of the abominations of slavery, go on a southern plantation, and call yourself a negro trader. Then there will be no concealment; and you will see and hear things that will seem to you impossible among human beings with immortal souls.
- Harriet Ann Jacobs Quote

No pen can give an adequate description of the all-pervading corruption produced by slavery.
- Harriet Ann Jacobs Quote

The beautiful spring came; and when Nature resumes her loveliness, the human soul is apt to revive also.
- Harriet Ann Jacobs Quote

The secrets of slavery are concealed like those of the Inquisition.
- Harriet Ann Jacobs Quote

There is a great difference between Christianity and religion at the south. If a man goes to the communion table, and pays money into the treasury of the church, no matter if it be the price of blood, he is called religious.
- Harriet Ann Jacobs Quote

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.
- Harriet Ann Jacobs Quote

When I was nearly twelve years old, my kind mistress sickened and died.
- Harriet Ann Jacobs Quote

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.
- Harriet Ann Jacobs Quote

When my babe was born, they said it was premature. It weighed only four pounds; but God let it live.
- Harriet Ann Jacobs Quote