Words of the Writers

Henry David Thoreau

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die discover that I had not lived." -Walden

"If a man does not keep pace with his companions perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer." -Walden

"Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once." --Reform Papers

"Be not simply good-be good for something." --Correspondence

"I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake up my neighbors." -Journal

"God exhibits himself to the walker today, as much as in a burning one to Moses of old." -Journal in Jan.

". . . the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." -Walden

"Thus men will lie on their backs talking of the fall of man and, never make an effort to get up." -Reform

"For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms, and did my duty faithfully, though I never received one cent for it." -Journal

"I think we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right." -Civil Disobedience

"Walt Whitman occasionally suggests something a little more than human. You can't confound him with the other inhabitants of Brooklyn or New York. How they must shudder when they read him! He is awfully good." -Letter to Harrison Blake, 1865

"Think of our life in nature, -daily to be shown matter, to come into contact with it, -rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! The actual world! The common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we Where are we? -The Maine Woods

"It is a great art to saunter." -Journal

"I should not talk about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well." -Walden

Louisa May Alcott

"Women have been called queens for a long time, but the kingdom given them isn't worth ruling." -An Old-Fashioned Girl

"I believe it is as much a right and duty for women to do something with their lives as for men and we

are not going to be satisfied with such frivolous parts as you give us." -Rose in Bloom

"House keeping ain't no joke." -Little Women

". . . girls are so queer you never know what they mean. They say No when they mean Yes and drive a man out of his wits for the fun of it. . . ." -Little Women

". . . a woman's three best comforters-kind words, a baby, and a cup of tea." -Work

"To have Mr. Emerson for an intellectual God all one's life is to be invested with a chain armor of propriety

. . . . And what would my own good father think of me if I set folks to doing the things I have a longing to see my people do?" -Essays, Stern

"I am very glad and grateful that my profession will make me a useful, happy and independent spinster." -Jo's Boys

"'Go nurse the soldiers,' said my young brother. . . . I tore through the December slush as if the rebels were after me, and like many another recruit, burst in upon my family with the announcement-I've enlisted." -Hospital Sketches

"It was a strange life. . . hovering, like a massive cherubim over . . . the slumbering sons of man. I liked it

. . . and I learned to know these men better by night than through any intercourse by day." -Hospital Sketches

"More interesting than officers, ladies, mules, or pigs, were my colored brothers and sisters, because so unlike the respectable members of society I'd known in moral Boston." Hospital Sketches

" . . . these faulty hearts of ours cannot turn perfect in a night, but need frost and fire, wind and rain, to ripen and make them ready for the great harvest-home." My Contraband

"My sisters don't be afraid of the words 'old maid,' for it is in your power to make this a term of honor, not reproach." Happy Women

' . . . the coming generation of women will not only receive but deserve their liberty. . . ." Work

"If love comes as it should come, accept it in God's name and be worthy of His best blessing. If it never comes, then in God's name reject the shadow of it, for that can never satisfy a hungry heart." Happy Women

Nathaniel Hawthorne.

"No man for any considerable period can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be true." -The Scarlet Letter

"I don't want to be a doctor, and live by men's diseases; nor a minister and live by their sins; nor a lawyer to live by their quarrels. So I don't see there is anything left for me but to be an author." -Letter to his mother

"Life is made of marble and mud." -The House of Seven Gables

"Of all the events which constitute a person's biography, there is scarcely one to which the world so easily reconciles itself as to his death." -The House of Seven Gables

"Let the black flower blossom as it may!" -The Scarlet letter

"Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever." -Wakefield

"As the moral gloom of the world overpowers all systematic gaiety, even so was their home of wild mirth made desolate amid the sad forest." -The Maypole of Marymount

"Among many morals which press upon us from the poor minister's miserable experience, we put only this into a sentence: 'Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred.'" -The Scarlet Letter

"He [Herman Melville] can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other. . . . he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than most of us." -English Notebooks

"Mardi [Melville's third book] is a rich book, with depths here and there that compel a man to swim for his life."

"What other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer as inexorable as one's self!" -The House of Seven Gables

"By the sympathy of your human hearts for sin ye shall scent out all the places-whether in church, bedchamber, street, field, or forest-where crime has been committed, and shall exalt to behold the whole earth one stain of guilt, one mighty blood spot." -Young Goodman Brown

"In his [Thoreau's] presence one feels ashamed of having any money, or a house to live in. . ." Letter

Herman Melville

"The world is a ship on its passage out and not a voyage complete." -Moby-Dick

"Heaven have mercy on us all-Presbyterians and pagans alike-for we are somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending." -Moby-Dick

"A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard." -Moby-Dick

"Though I wrote the Gospels in this century, I should die in the gutter. . . . What I feel most moved to write, that is banned, -it will not pay. Yet altogether, write the other way I cannot." -Letter to Hawthorne

"To produce a mighty book you must choose a mighty theme." -Moby-Dick

"That mortal man who has more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true-not true, or undeveloped. With books the same. The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon's, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe. 'All is vanity. All' This willful world hath not got hold of unchristian Solomon's wisdom yet." -Moby-Dick

"Nay, I do not oscillate in Emerson's rainbow, but prefer rather to hang myself in mine own halter than to swing in any other man's swing. Yet I think Emerson is more than a brilliant fellow. Be his stuff begged, borrowed, or stolen, or of his own domestic manufacture he is an uncommon man. . . . I love all men who dive. Any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great whale to go down stairs five miles or more

. . . ." -Letter to Evert Duyckinck

"The world is mistaken in this Nathaniel Hawthorne. He is immeasurably deeper than the plummet of the mere critic. For it is not the brain that can test such a man; it is only the heart." -"Hawthorne and His Mosses"

"Let America prize and cherish her writers, yea let her glorify them. They are not so many in number, as to exhaust her good will. . . . It is for the nation's sake, and not for her author's sake, that I would have America be heedful of the increasing greatness among her writers." -"Hawthorne and His Mosses"

"Say what some poets will. Nature is not so much her own ever-sweet interpreter, as the mere supplier of that cunning alphabet, whereby selecting and combining as he pleases, each man reads his own peculiar lesson according to his own peculiar mind and mood." -Pierre

"Hark ye yet again,-the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each . . . there is but some unknown but reasoning thing . . . . strike through the mask!" -Moby-Dick

"I have swam through libraries and sailed through oceans; I have had to do with whales with these visible hands; I am in earnest; and I will try." -Moby-Dick

Frederick Douglass

"A little learning, indeed, may be a dangerous thing, but the want of learning is a calamity to any people."

-Address, Washington, D.C., 1889

"The white man's happiness cannot be purchased by the black man's misery." -The North Star

"The destiny of the colored American is the destiny of America." -Speech, Boston, 1862

"The life of the nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous." -Speech, Washington, D.C., 1885

"The price of liberty is eternal vigilance." -Address, Washington, D.C. 1889

"If a slave has a bad master, his ambition is to get a better; when he gets better, he aspires to have the best; and when he gets the best, he aspires to be his own master." -An Appeal to the British People

"America cannot always sit as a queen in peace and repose. Prouder and stronger governmants than hers have been shattered by the bolts of a just God. " -The North Star

"Oppression makes a wise man mad." -Address, Rochester, 1852

"Woman knows and feels her wrongs as a man cannot know and feel them, and she knows as well as he can know, what measures are needed to redress them." -Woman's Journal, 1888

". . . the church of this country is not only indifferent to the wrongs of the slave, it actually takes sides with the oppressors. It has made itself the bulwark of American slavery, and the shield of American slave hunters. Many of its most eloquent Divines . . . have shamelessly given the sanction of religion and the Bible to the whole slave system. They have taught that man may, properly, be a slave; that the relation of master and slave is ordained of God; that to send back an escaped bondman to his master is clearly the duty of all followers of the Lord Jesus Christ; and this horrible blasphemy is palmed off upon the world for Christianity. For my part, I would say, welcome infidelity! Welcome atheism! Welcome anything! In preference to the gospel as preached by those Divines!" -Speech, Rochester, July 4, 1852

"The midnight sky and the silent stars have been the witness of your devotion to freedom and of your own heroism." -Letter to Harriet Tubman, 1868

"The simplest truths often meet with the sternest resistance and are slowest in getting general acceptance."

-"The Woman Suffrage Movement," Essay, 1870

Walt Whitman

"I celebrate myself and sing myself,

And what I assume you shall assume." --Song of Myself

"I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars." -Leaves of Grass

"I think I could turn and live with the animals,

they are so placid and self-contained, . . .

Not one of them is respectable or unhappy over,

the whole earth." -Leaves of Grass

"There is something in my nature furtive like an old hen! You see a hen wandering up and down a hedgrow, looking apparently quite unconcerned, but presently she finds a concealed spot, and furtively lays an egg, and comes away as though nothing had happened! That is how I felt in writing Leaves of Grass."

"The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem. . . . Here at last is something in the doings of man that corresponds with the broadcast doings of day and night." -Preface to Leaves of Gress

"In the faces of men and women I see God." -Leaves of Grass

"Political democracy, as it exists and practically works in America, with all its threatening evils, supplies a training school for making first-class man. It is life's gymnasium, not of good only, but of all." -Democratic Vistas

"To have great poets there must be great audiences too." -Notes left Over

"[Thoreau was] one of the native forces-stands for a fact, a movement, an upheaval: Thoreau belongs to America, to the transcendental, to the protesters . . . he was a force-he looms up bigger and bigger: his dying does not seem to have hurt him a bit: every year has added to his fame. . . . One thing about Thoreau keeps him very near to me: I refer to his lawless dissent-his going his own absolute road let hell blaze all it chooses."

"I never see that man [Lincoln] without feeling that he is one to become personally attached to, for his combination of purest, heartiest, tenderness and native western form of manliness." The Inauguration, 1865

"O we can wait no longer,

We too take ship O soul,

Joyous we too launch out on trackless seas,

Fearless for unknown shores." -Passage to India

"I say the whole earth and all the stars in the sky are for religion's sake." -Leaves of Grass

"Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself' / (I am large, I contain multitudes)." -Leaves