Phil Wade

“The practice of separating children from their mother, and hiring the latter out at distances too great to admit of their meeting, except at long intervals, is a marked feature of the cruelty and barbarity of the slave system. But it is in harmony with the grand aim of slavery, which, always and everywhere, is to reduce man to a level with the brute. It is a successful method of obliterating from the mind and heart of the slave, all just ideas of the sacredness of the family, as an institution.”
― Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom

“Herminia was a refined, intelligent, sensitive woman but that was no defense against self-deception. Miss Prim had a theory about self-deception: the female sex seemed particularly and cruelly vulnerable to it.”
― Natalia Sanmartín Fenollera

“The novel [Pamela] is also a very powerful early expression of the modern self, one who sees her soul as equal in human worth and dignity to anyone, regardless of social class or power--and this, too, is part of evangelicalism.”
― Karen Swallow Prior, The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis

“It seemed both proper and at the same time deeply unfair that so much of life was left to chance.”
― Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These