The Underground Railroad Quotes
"Know your value and you know your place in the order."
"Liberty was reserved for other people, for the citizens of the City of Pennsylvania bustling a thousand miles to the north."
"Every dream a dream of escape even when it didn't look like it."
"When you are sold that many times, the world is teaching you to pay attention."
"A broken calabash was worth less than one that held its water, a hook that kept its catfish more prized than one that relinquished its bait."
"In America the quirk was that people were things."
"If you were a thing--a cart or a horse or a slave--your value determined your possibilities."
"Sometimes a slave will be lost in a brief eddy of liberation."
"The movement of the stars across the night, the cooperation of humors in the blood."
"To escape the boundary of the plantation was to escape the fundamental principles of your existence: impossible."
"These fantasies gave Ajarry comfort when her burdens were such to splinter her into a thousand pieces."
"The survivors from her village told her that when her father couldn't keep the pace of the long march, the slavers stove in his head and left his body by the trail."
"She knew that the white man's scientists peered beneath things to understand how they worked."
"There was no point in confronting the woman. Alice had been beloved of Randall, and now James Randall, who had grown tall on her mincemeat pies."
"The Randall brothers had emerged from the great house and were among them."
"America was a ghost in the darkness, like her."
"Freedom was a thing that shifted as you looked at it."
"Being free had nothing to do with chains or how much space you had."
"All men are created equal, unless we decide you are not a man."
"Slavery is a curse, though, that much is true."
"The only thing colored folks hadn't built was the tree."
"The wilderness stretched for forty years before others found their promised land."
"People always got things wrong, on purpose as much as by accident."
"The train sped past the station and out of sight."
"In liberty or bondage, the African could not be separated from the American."
"They didn't need people to say what they meant. The tables and facts couldn't be shaped into what they were not."
"The moon grew fat and thin, there were solstices, first frosts, and spring rains. All these things proceeded without the interference of men."
"Perhaps even host someone for the Friday Festival. Their porch had a perfect view."
"You can't just come in here, muscling about."
"The Fugitive Slave Law says I have a right to return this property to its owner. That's what I aim to do."
"You don't have to be afraid, Cora. You're going home."
"A girl's got to look after her interests if she's going to get ahead in this country."
"We can't have you too clever. We can't have you so fit you outrun us."
"Every state is different, Lumbly said. If Tennessee had a temperament, it took after the dark personality of the world, with a taste for arbitrary punishment."
"Sometimes a useful delusion is better than a useless truth."
"We may not know the way through the forest, but we can pick each other up when we fall, and we will arrive together."
"The world may be mean, but people don't have to be, not if they refuse."
"Freedom was a community laboring for something lovely and rare."
"All I truly know is that we rise and fall as one, one colored family living next door to one white family."
"The underground railroad is bigger than its operators--it's all of you, too."
"Everything you ever knew told you that freedom was a trick--yet here you are."
"Men start off good and then the world makes them mean."
"We're not supposed to talk about what we do down here."
"She was free and black and stewards of her own fates."