Marguerite

“I can testify, from my own experience and observation, that slavery is a curse to the whites as well as to the blacks. It makes white fathers cruel and sensual; the sons violent and licentious; it contaminates the daughters, and makes the wives wretched.”
― Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Written by Herself

“All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.”
― Edmund Burke

“There are wrongs which even the grave does not bury.”
― Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Written by Herself

“Photograph of the Girl The girl sits on the hard ground, the dry pan of Russia, in the drought of 1921, stunned, eyes closed, mouth open, raw, hot wind blowing sand in her face. Hunger and puberty are taking her together. She leans on a sack, layers of clothes fluttering in the heat, the new radius of her arm curved. She cannot be not beautiful, but she is starving. Each day she grows thinner, and her bones grow longer, porous. The caption says she is going to starve to death that winter with millions of others. Deep in her body the ovaries let out her first eggs, golden as drops of grain.”
― Sharon Olds, Strike Sparks: Selected Poems, 1980-2002