Quotes & Sayings About The Middle Passage

African American racial consciousness responds to the horrors of the Middle Passage and New World slavery as well as to the unfulfilled promise of "all men are created equal." Blackness becomes a form of "double consciousness," as W. E. B. Du Bois put it long ago, a sense of being both African and American, insiders and outsiders, different and equal.
In — Bruce Dain

I just wish moments weren't so fleeting!' Isaac called to the man on the roof, 'They pass so quickly!'
'Fleeting?!' responded the tilling man, 'Moments? They pass quickly?! ... Why, once a man is finished growing, he still has twenty years of youth. After that, he has twenty years of middle age. Then, unless misfortune strikes, nature gives him twenty thoughtful years of old age. Why do you call that quickly?' And with that, the tilling man wiped his sweaty brow and continued tilling; and the dejected Isaac continued wandering.
'Stupid fool!' Isaac muttered quietly to himself as soon as he was far enough away not to be heard. — Roman Payne

It's all fine to say, "Time will heal everything, this too shall pass away. People will forget" - and things like that when you are not involved, but when you are there is no passage of time, people do not forget and you are in the middle of something that does not change. — John Steinbeck

And like most middle-aged people who hear the clock ticking in their lives, I had come to resent a waste or theft of my time that was greater than any theft of my goods or money. — James Lee Burke

Inspired by Alex Haley's 'Roots,' at the age of 11 I began a handwritten Middle Passage story called 'Lawdy, Lawdy, Make Us Free.' I was raised by civil rights activists with a very strong sense of racial history and consciousness. — Tananarive Due

Which class is happiest, the rich, the middle class or the poor? A very successful executive of a large organization touches upon this vital subject in a long letter to all his salesmen. He uses as his text a passage from Robinson Crusoe which included this: ""My Father bid me observe it, and I should always find that the calamities of life were shared among the upper and lower part of mankind; but that the middle station had the fewest disasters, and were not exposed to so many vicissitudes as the higher or lower part of mankind. — B.C. Forbes

I had a hole in my voice. It's an area in the voice where it's air. It's just - there's no - it's just very airy. And my classical teachers were just so frustrated with me because I would have these deep, low notes that were really strong, and the higher register was strong, but right in that middle area, it was really hard. It was like a passage. And many singers go through this and work it out. But I realized in jazz, I could just take advantage of that and take advantage of having a voice that was very different in different areas. — Cecile McLorin Salvant

But why was the room suddenly becoming so dark? It was the middle of the afternoon. With a supreme effort Giuseppe Corte, who felt himself paralyzed with a strange lethargy, looked at the clock on the nightstand beside the bed. It was 3:30. He turned his head in the other direction and saw that the shutters, in obedience to some mysterious command, were closing slowly, blocking the passage of light. — Dino Buzzati

And when the governess had left, he would slip out of his own room and peer at her door until her light was extinguished at last, before he returned to bed to stew anew in lust and yearning.
A habit that he'd kept to this day, whenever they happened to be under the same roof.
Her light turned off. He sighed. How long would he keep at this? Soon he would be twenty-seven. Did he still plan to stand in a dark passage in the middle of the night and gaze upon her door when he was thirty-seven? Forty-seven? Ninetyseven? — Sherry Thomas

It was not Christianity which freed the slave: Christianity accepted slavery; Christian ministers defended it; Christian merchants trafficked in human flesh and blood, and drew their profits from the unspeakable horrors of the middle passage. Christian slaveholders treated their slaves as they did the cattle in their fields: they worked them, scourged them, mated them , parted them, and sold them at will. Abolition came with the decline in religious belief, and largely through the efforts of those who were denounced as heretics. — Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner

It's almost a rite of passage for the middle-aged, it seems, to invent generational stereotypes for dumping on the young. — Robin Marantz Henig

The only requisite to entry into the Middle Passage is to have discovered that one does not know who one is, that there are no rescuers, no Mommy or Daddy, and that one's fellow travelers will do well to survive themselves. — James Hollis

You can say I had a severe case of 'Roots' envy. I wanted to be like Alex Haley, and I wanted to be able to ... do my family tree back to the slave ship and then reverse the Middle Passage, as I like to put it, and find the tribe or ethnic group that I was from in Africa. — Henry Louis Gates

The Mormons' passage from bugbears of the Republican Party to its stalwarts may be analogized to a similar move among middle-class white Southerners, to whom the Republican Party was anathema until the 1970s and '80s, after which it became almost the sole representative. — Noah Feldman

[...] I'd wake up in the middle of the night to the Star-Spangled Banner and some old film of a flag blowing in the wind, telling you the day was over and it was long past time to go to bed. That was back when days used to end, before CNN and infomercials, before all our days bled right into each other. — Michael Montoure

In this way, racism is rendered as the innocent daughter of Mother Nature, and one is left to deplore the Middle Passage or the Trail of Tears the way one deplores an earthquake, a tornado, or any other phenomenon that can be cast as beyond the handiwork of men. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

And this time as the lashes come, try to think about the pain, instead of against it, because there is not one single aspect of life, past, present, or future, that does not tear your reason from you, to think on it. So think about the pain. This pain after all has its limits. You can chart its passage through your body. It has a beginning, middle, end. Imagine if it had a color. The first cut of the lash is what, red? Red, spreading into a brilliant yellow. And this one again, red, red, no yellow, and then white, white, white, white ... Why have you incarcerated yourself in this palazzo of torture chambers, why do you not leave this place? Because you are a monster and this is a school for monsters, and if you leave here, then you will be completely, completely alone! Alone with this!
Don't weep in front of these strangers. Swallow it down. Don't weep in front of these strangers! Cry to heaven, cry to heaven, cry to heaven. — Anne Rice

After clearing 9 metres of the descending passage, in about the middle of the afternoon, we came upon a second sealed doorway, which was almost the exact replica of the first. — Howard Carter

I have been to Graceland a hundred times. Every kid in middle Tennessee has this night where it hits midnight, and they are like, 'Let's go to Graceland!' It's a rite of passage. I did it. — DJ Qualls

A moment later the race began - poof - without any fanfare. There was no horn or gun or even a megaphone. But someone at the starting line must have yelled, "Go!" for everyone began running. Some things, even some of the most life-changing experiences, start that way. No one says, "This (fill in the blank) is going to be one of the most radical rites of passage you will ever travel through, so pay attention." Someone just says, "Okay, go ahead now," and you find yourself in the middle of an unexpected lightning storm with your life flashing before you. — Cami Ostman

Other letters simply relate the small events that punctuate the passage of time: roses picked at dusk, the laziness of a rainy Sunday, a child crying himself to sleep. Capturing the moment, these small slices of life, these small gusts of happiness, move me more deeply than all the rest. A couple of lines or eight pages, a Middle Eastern stamp or a suburban postmark ... I hoard all these letters like treasure. One day I hope to fasten them end to end in a half-mile streamer, to float in the wind like a banner raised to the glory of friendship.
It will keep the vultures at bay. — Jean-Dominique Bauby

I have my first review this is exciting
I write a passage to introduce the book and want to share it on SNS .
As below words,hope you can give me some advice.

" Want to share a book with all of you,my friends .So luck to read this book.
He is not a famous writer but all story is he's real experience,how to be abuse by his mother,
how to overcome learn disablity ,how to be a good father in life and how to get a middle class life
in US now.The purpose to write this book is that he want to help someone who have same experience
with him and encourage those people,you are not alone,there are many people have experienced
similar things,you can overcome it and you deserved a good life. This book can help us to avoid many
mistake when we as a parent . — Shawn Woods

I thought that, given the system of rewards central to our economic system, in which profit maximization is valued above all else and specifically above life, it is probably just as irresistible to the owners of capital (human or otherwise) to exploit workers (and the land): "Nothing personal," they say as they load their property onto the ship bound for the Middle Passage, "but a man's gotta turn a dime. — Derrick Jensen

I keep sailing on in this middle passage. I am sailing into the wind and the dark. But I am doing my best to keep my boat steady and my sails full. — Arthur Ashe

We have inherited a fear of memories of slavery. It is as if to remember and acknowledge slavery would amount to our being consumed by it. As a matter of fact, in the popular black imagination, it is easier for us to construct ourselves as children of Africa, as the sons and daughters of kings and queens, and thereby ignore the Middle Passage and centuries of enforced servitude in the Americas. Although some of us might indeed be the descendants of African royalty, most of us are probably descendants of their subjects, the daughters and sons of African peasants or workers. — Angela Y. Davis

Many of the Iroquois and Huron houses were of similar construction, the partitions being at the sides only, leaving a wide passage down the middle of the house. — Francis Parkman