“Some of us rush through life and some of us saunter through life. Mrs. Vesey sat through life.”

“...it will always remain my private persuasion that Nature was absorbed in making cabbages when Mrs. Vesey was born, and that the good lady suffered the consequences of a vegetable preoccupation in the mind of the Mother of us all. ”

“Nature has so much to do in this world, and is engaged in generating such a vast variety of co-existent productions, that she must surely be now and then too flurried and confused to distinguish between the different processes that she is carrying on at the same time. Starting from this point of view, it will always remain my private persuasion that Nature was absorbed in making cabbages when Mrs. Vesey was born, and that the good lady suffered the consequences of a vegetable preoccupation in the mind of the Mother of us all.”

“The books—the generous friends who met me without suspicion—the merciful masters who never used me ill! The only years of my life that I can look back on with something like pride... Early and late, through the long winter nights and the quiet summer days, I drank at the fountain of knowledge, and never wearied of the draught.”

“Our words are giants when they do us an injury, and dwarfs when they do us a service.”

“My business in life is to eat, drink, sleep, and die. Everything else is superfluity and I will have none of it. ”

“The small pulse of the life within me, and the great heart of the city around me, seemed to be sinking in unison.”