Elizabeth Bell > Quotes

“Love is never a sin.’ What a beautiful sentiment.”
― Elizabeth Bell, Necessary Sins

“One day, Joseph, all the false trappings will fall away, and only the perfection of God will remain. If we are wise, if we listen to Him alone, we can glimpse that perfection here on Earth.”
― Elizabeth Bell, Necessary Sins

“An ass could not help being an ass, but it was still an ass.”
― Elizabeth Bell, Necessary Sins

“Why did God place the Tree of Knowledge in Paradise? Didn’t He know Adam would eat the forbidden fruit?”
― Elizabeth Bell, Necessary Sins

“So perhaps he had loved Tessa, in his vampiric way.”
― Elizabeth Bell, Native Stranger

“O Love, O fire! once he drew With one long kiss my whole soul thro’ My lips, as sunlight drinketh dew.”
― Elizabeth Bell, Native Stranger

“Though to visit the sins of the fathers upon the children may be a morality good enough for divinities, it is scorned by average human nature, and it therefore does not mend the matter. — Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891)”
― Elizabeth Bell, Necessary Sins

“This is why you must never love a created thing more than the Creator. Only God is deathless. Only He will never fail you.”
― Elizabeth Bell, Necessary Sins

“There’s this Gullah proverb my mother taught me: ‘If’n you hold onto your mad, it will kill all your”
― Elizabeth Bell, Native Stranger

“The best teacher is a good book,”
― Elizabeth Bell, Necessary Sins

“Everything is disastrous under slavery; it renders the master cruel, vindictive, proud; it renders the slave sluggish, deceitful, hypocritical;”
― Elizabeth Bell, Necessary Sins

“Mix rain and earth together, and they become LIFE and BEAUTY.”
― Elizabeth Bell, Necessary Sins

“Christ’s Passion: the scourge, the Crown of Thorns, the nails.”
― Elizabeth Bell, Necessary Sins

“who is madder: the ‘master’ who claims another man is his property, or the ‘slave’ who seizes his ‘unalienable Right’ to ‘Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness’?”
― Elizabeth Bell, Native Stranger

“apologize sincerely and profusely for the way this must look, sir. You have every right to demand that I marry your daughter, but—” Edward was gripping his glass so hard he feared it might shatter in his hand. “Did you fuck her?” The boy winced as if Edward had slapped him. Oh, Edward liked making him squirm. “No, sir. I swear to you on her mother’s grave: I did not touch your daughter. Not even as a physician. It was a verbal consultation, nothing more.”
― Elizabeth Bell, Native Stranger

“No matter his age, no matter how many generations his family has been free, every free colored person is required by law to attach himself to a white guardian. Every free colored person is also forced to pay an annual capitation”
― Elizabeth Bell, Native Stranger

“Not all of our colored lunatics are slaves. Some are free.” “In this city,” Uncle Joseph declared, “no man or woman of color is truly free.”
― Elizabeth Bell, Native Stranger

“gardener, so I thought her appropriate”
― Elizabeth Bell, Necessary Sins

“they lost sight of the dolphins, Clare pointed out the pink horseshoe of Castle Pinckney on Shute’s Folly, the grey walls of Fort Sumter, and the green oasis of their destination in the distance.”
― Elizabeth Bell, Native Stranger

“Adam was but human—this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple’s sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden.”
― Elizabeth Bell, Necessary Sins

“Slavery is ‘the greatest moral evil that can desolate the civilized world”
― Elizabeth Bell, Necessary Sins

“Saint Paul promises: “In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet, the dead shall rise again incorruptible, and we shall all be changed.”
― Elizabeth Bell, Sweet Medicine

“Samuel Cartwright, of Louisiana?”
― Elizabeth Bell, Native Stranger

“Tree of Knowledge.” He lowered the pomegranate into its new home. “Apples don’t grow very well in Mesopotamia, where the Garden of Eden must have been.”
― Elizabeth Bell, Necessary Sins

“Every year that passes, the Devil gives us more opportunities to make terrible mistakes, to make choices we’ll regret for the rest of our lives.”
― Elizabeth Bell, Native Stranger

“baby is God’s opinion that life should go on. — Carl Sandburg, Remembrance Rock (1948)”
― Elizabeth Bell, Native Stranger

“Uncle Joseph shrugged. “The meaning of ‘Canaan’ is obscure. But it’s irrelevant. There is no Biblical or classical basis whatsoever for connecting the ‘curse of Ham’ with blackness. Noah cursed Ham’s son Canaan. Dark-skinned Africans are the descendants of Ham’s son Cush, who wasn’t cursed at all. In the Middle Ages,”
― Elizabeth Bell, Native Stranger

“sin still has consequences.”
― Elizabeth Bell, Native Stranger

“Slaves are men and women and children first, David,” Uncle Joseph insisted. “Slavery is a condition,”
― Elizabeth Bell, Native Stranger

“David’s children. He could marry a white woman like Clare and father a black baby. Such a child would make her an outcast. No matter how much David loved Clare or their child, everyone else would point and stare and flay her with their tongues. If his ancestry became public knowledge, David would become a permanent alien in his own country. In the words of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in its decision about Dred Scott, colored men were “altogether unfit to associate with the white race either in social”
― Elizabeth Bell, Native Stranger