Before She Was Harriet Quotes & Sayings

Advice is overrated. Before you learn what others know, you need to learn what YOU know. — Harriet Rubin

I do think that there are certain parts, if you are lucky enough to play them, that are bigger than you, and they stretch you. I don't think you become a bigger person, but you develop certain muscles you didn't have before. — Harriet Walter

Shame is paralyzing and debilitating. It invites us not to be heard, at least not in an authentic way. Acting courageously when shame enters the picture requires extraordinary courage because people will do anything to escape from shame or from the possibility that shame will be evoked. It is just too difficult to go there. Even for people who will walk in to the fires of transformation to face fear.

Men and women tend to manage shame differently. Generally, men have less tolerance for shame, perhaps because they are shamed almost from birth for half their humanity. The so called feminine part of themselves including anything vulnerable or seen as weak. Men often sit with shame for only a nanosecond before flipping it into something more masculine or therefore tolerable like anger or rage or a need to dominate devalue or control. — Harriet Lerner

What a situation, now, for a patriotic senator, that had been all the week before spurring up the legislature of his native state to pass more stringent resolutions against escaping fugitives, their harborers and abettors! — Harriet Beecher Stowe

In my dreams and visions, I seemed to see a line, and on the other side of that line were green fields, and lovely flowers, and beautiful white ladies, who stretched out their arms to me over the line, but I couldn't reach them no-how. I always fell before I got to the line. — Harriet Tubman

If ever you have had a romantic, uncalculating friendship, - a boundless worship and belief in some hero of your soul, - if ever you have so loved, that all cold prudence, all selfish worldly considerations have gone down like drift-wood before a river flooded with new rain from heaven, so that you even forgot yourself, and were ready to cast your whole being into the chasm of existence, as an offering before the feet of another, and all for nothing, - if you awoke bitterly betrayed and deceived, still give thanks to God that you have had one glimpse of heaven. The door now shut will open again. Rejoice that the noblest capability of your eternal inheritance has been made known to you; treasure it, as the highest honor of your being, that ever you could so feel, -that so divine a guest ever possessed your soul. — Harriet Beecher Stowe

Not to be with the one you love, Laura, the one person you should be spending your life with
it's like a kind of living death. To wake up every morning and know you are still here. To have that brief, sweet moment of blankness, before your mind reminds you who you are, and why you are unhappy. It was like hell. A living hell of the heart's own making. — Harriet Evans

Before modern feminism, stories of female ambition were silenced or erased; even now, they are told with apology ("Yes, it's a great honor to be a Nobel Prize laureate, but really, what I love best is staying home and being a mother to Kevin and Annie"). — Harriet Lerner

Ruby stood beside Iris - holding a leash, and on the end of that leash was . . . Buford, Harriet and Oliver's motley dog. "Why does Ruby have Buford?" Oliver asked no one in particular. "Abigail needed something borrowed, and Buford was what she chose, but I'm not certain that exactly counts since she's not holding the leash," Harriet said in a hushed voice before she put her finger to her lips and nodded back to Abigail. As — Jen Turano

But to the slave mother New Year's day comes laden with peculiar sorrows. She sits on her cold cabin floor, watching the children who may all be torn from her the next morning; and often does she wish that she and they might die before the day dawns. — Harriet Ann Jacobs

Curiously, the darkness seemed to have something to do with Harriet, Ron's intended, and I thought for a time that it was simply the reality of Harriet's arrival that had dramatized the passing of time: we had been talking about it and now suddenly it was here - just as Brenda's departure would be here before we knew it. — Philip Roth

Fortunately, I come from an activist mother, so I didn't have to rely on the history books. The history books teach us nothing about the Underground Railroad aside from Harriet Tubman. So I knew more about it but, obviously, I had to dig deeper and expand my knowledge and do a lot of research once I took this project on. I had, like, a good two months to research before we started shooting, which isn't a lot, and I continued it throughout the five months of us shooting. — Jurnee Smollett

A day of grace is yet held out to us. Both North and South have been guilty before God; and the Christian Church has a heavy account to answer. Not by combining together, to protest injustice and cruelty, and making a common capital of sin, is this Union to be saved-but by repentance, justice and mercy; for, not surer is the eternal law by which the millstone sinks in the ocean, than that stronger law, by which injustice and cruelty shall bring on nations the wrath of Almighty God. — Harriet Beecher Stowe

Dogs can bear more cold than human beings, but they do not like cold any better than we do; and when a dog has his choice, he will very gladly stretch himself on a rug before the fire for his afternoon nap. — Harriet Beecher Stowe

Any book, which is at all important, should be reread immediately — Arthur Schopenhauer

I really must tell you, I have never been a thespian.'
Harriet waved this off like a gnat. 'That is what is so wonderful about my plays. Anyone can enjoy himself.'
...
'I am *not* playing a frog.' His eyes narrowed wickedly. 'Unless you [Anne] do, too.'
'There is only one frog in the play,' Harriet said blithely.
'But isn't the title The Marsh of the Frogs?' he asked, even though he should have known better. 'Plural?' Good Lord, the entire conversation was making him dizzy.
'That's the irony,' Harriet said, and Daniel managed to stop himself just before he asked her what she meant by that (because it fulfilled no definition of irony *he'd* ever heard). — Julia Quinn

May I have a glass of water? For some reason, my throat suddenly feels incredibly parched."
Harriet nodded but before she could take so much as a single step toward the kitchen, Lucetta brushed past her.
"I'll get it." She grabbed Millie's hand and began tugging her out of the room. "You can help."
"But it doesn't take two people to fetch a ... ouch ... Did you just pinch me? Because that felt remarkably like a pinch, and ... " Millie's voice faded away as Lucetta hauled her into the hallway and toward the kitchen, shutting the door firmly behind them. — Jen Turano

She was different. She liked hearing it, because she wanted to recall just enough of it to remember that she never wanted to go back to being the person she'd been before. — Harriet Evans

Harriet grinned at Betty Armstrong, hearing the familiar academic wrangle begin. Before ten minutes had passed, somebody had introduced the word "values." An hour later they were still at it. Finally the Bursar was heard to quote: "God made the integers; all else is the work of man." "Oh, bother!" cried the Dean. "Do let's keep mathematics out of it. And physics. I cannot cope with them. — Dorothy L. Sayers

Look at me, now. Don't I sit before you, e very way, just as much a man as you are? Look at my face - look at my hands - look at my body," and the young man dr ew himself up proudly. "Why am I not a man, as much as anybody? — Harriet Beecher Stowe

I grew up around horses, but acting and riding on camera is a whole different thing. — Emilia Clarke

My name," I tell Wilbur in the most dignified voice I can find, "Was inspired by Harriet Quimby, the first female American pilot and the first woman ever to cross the Channel in an aeroplane. My mother chose it to represent freedom and bravery and independence, and she gave it to me just before she died."
There's a short pause while Wilbur looks appropriately moved. Then Dad says, "Who told you that?"
"Annabel did."
"Well, it's not true at all. You were named after Harriet the tortoise, the second longest living tortoise in the world."
There's a silence while I stare at Dad and Annabel puts her head in her hands so abruptly that the pen starts to leak into her collar. "Richard," she moans quietly.
"A tortoise?" I repeat in dismay. "I'm named after a tortoise? What the hell is a tortoise supposed to represent?"
"Longevity? — Holly Smale

It was the first time that ever George had sat down on equal terms at any white man's table; and he sat down, at first, with some constraint, and awkwardness; but they all exhaled and went off like fog, in the genial morning rays of this simple overflowing kindness.
This indeed, was a home, - home, -a word that George had never yet known a meaning for; and a belief in God, and trust in His providence, began to encircle his heart, as, with a golden cloud of protection and confidence, dark, misanthropic, pining, atheistic doubts, and fierce despair, melted away before the light of a living Gospel, breathed in living faces, preached by a thousand unconscious acts of love and good-will, which, like the cup of cold water given in the name of a disciple, shall never lose their reward. — Harriet Beecher Stowe

read now, work later. it probibly wasnt that important anyway! — Molly Clarke

The country is almost ruined with pious white people: such pious politicians as we have just before elections, such pious goings on in all departments of church and state, that a fellow does not know who'll cheat him next. — Harriet Beecher Stowe

What she didn't say was:
"Can I punch both your sisters?"
"How do you cope with this, all the time?"
"Why can't it be the two of us, like it was before?"
And,
"Do you realize I've fallen for you? — Harriet Evans

We found, before the hands of the dial had taught us the lapse of a week, that this would be something not to be endured. The sun sank lower every day behind the crags and silvery horns; the heavens grew to wear a hue of violet, almost black, and yet unbearably dazzling; as the notes of our voices fell upon the atmosphere they assumed a metallic tone, as if the air itself had become frozen from the beginning of the world and they tinkled against it; our sufferings had mounted in their intensity till they were too great to be resisted. — Harriet Prescott Spofford

It was a feeling which he had seen before in his mother; but no chord within vibrated to it. — Harriet Beecher Stowe

The rabbit of Easter. He bring of the chocolate. — David Sedaris

What you love the most is what you have to fight the hardest to keep. — Kirsten Hubbard

The habit of dwelling on the past, has a narrowing as well as a debilitating influence. Behind us, there is a small, - an almost insignificant measure of time; before us, there is an eternity. It is the natural tendency of the mind to magnify the one, and to diminish the other ... — Harriet Martineau

When they told me my new-born babe was a girl, my heart was heavier than it had ever been before. Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women. — Harriet Ann Jacobs