"But this time, he says, a woman like you could make all the difference."
"The abolitionists may well call me their equal, but their lips do not yet say my name and their ears do not yet hear my story."
"I will write down my story so that it waits like a restful beast with lungs breathing and heart beating."
"Don't laugh, John Clarkson says a little too sharply, I bet she has read more books than you."
"Englishmen do love to bury one thing so completely in another that the two can only be separated by force: peanuts in candy, boiled ginger with honey, Africans in irons."
"If I live long enough to finish this story, it will outlive me."
"Sometimes I imagine the first reader to come upon my story. Could it be a girl? Perhaps a woman. A man. An Englishman. An African. One of these people will find my story and pass it along. And then, I believe, I will have lived for a reason."
