Rebecca Harding Davis > Quotes

“Well, what was it to be a thief? He met the question at last, face to face, wiping the clammy drops of sweat from his forehead. God made this money - the fresh air, too - for his children's use. He never made the difference between poor and rich.”
― Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills and Other Stories

“The note is the same, I fancy, be the octave high or low.”
― Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills and Other Stories

“Be just,—not like man's law, which seizes on one isolated fact, but like God's judging angel, whose clear, sad eye saw all the countless cankering days of this man's life.”
― Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills

“Stop a moment. I am going to be honest. This is what I want you to do. I want you to hide your disgust, take no heed to your clean clothes, and come right down with me,—here, into the thickest of the fog and mud and foul effluvia. I want you to hear this story. There is a secret down here, in this nightmare fog, that has lain dumb for centuries; I want to make it a real thing to you.”
― Rebecca Harding Davis, Life In the Iron-Mills

“Lost? There is a curious point for you to settle, my friend, who study psychology in a lazy, dilettante way. Stop a moment. I am going to be honest. This is what I want you to do. I want you to hide your disgust, take no heed to your clean clothes, and come right down with me,—here, into the thickest of the fog and mud and foul effluvia. I want you to hear this story. There is a secret down here, in this nightmare fog, that has lain dumb for centuries; I want to make it a real thing to you. You, Egoist, or Pantheist, or Arminian, busy in making straight paths for your feet on the hills, do not see it clearly,—this terrible question which men here have gone mad and died trying to answer.”
― Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills