Date: 1845

"Their minds had been starved by their cruel masters. They had been shut up in mental darkness."

— Douglass, Frederick (1818-1895)

Date: 1845

"My soul was set all on fire."

— Douglass, Frederick (1818-1895)

Date: December 1847

"These were days when my heart was volcanic / As the scoriac rivers that roll-- / As the lavas that restlessly roll / Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek / In the ultimate climes of the pole."

— Poe, Edgar Allan (1809-1849)

Date: 1850

"My imagination was a tarnished mirror. It would not reflect, or only with miserable dimness, the figures with which I did my best to people it."

— Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804-1864)

Date: 1850

"The characters of the narrative would not be warmed and rendered malleable by any heat that I could kindle at my intellectual forge."

— Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804-1864)

Date: March 17, 1852

"I make the truest observations and distinctions then, when the will is yet wholly asleep and the mind works like a machine without friction."

— Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Date: 1854

"Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought."

— Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Date: 1854

"Snipes and woodcocks also may afford rare sport; but I trust it would be nobler game to shoot one’s self."

— Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Date: 1854

"They love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which may still animate their clay."

— Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Date: 1854

"Patriotism is a maggot in their heads."

— Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)