Virginia Quotes

“Mr. Pugh turned bright red. His cheeks puffed up like the galls of shad from the nearby river. His green- monster eyes rolled around his face, and he pounded both fists down on the table, and through grinding teeth and snorting gasps hollered, “INDEED NOT, MISS KNAPP! Slaves are not allowed to read and write. We have you here with good and steady pay to instruct our children and nothing else. Going near that boy, or any other slave, with chalk or book learnin’ is strictly forbidden! Do you understand me?”
― Sheridan Brown, The Viola Factor

“...The Presidential election has given me less anxiety than I myself could have imagined. The next administration will be a troublesome one, to whomsoever it falls, and our John has been too much worn to contend much longer with conflicting factions. I call him our John, because, when you were at the Cul de sac at Paris, he appeared to me to be almost as much your boy as mine.

...As to the decision of your author, though I wish to see the book {Flourens’s Experiments on the functions of the nervous system in vertebrated animals}, I look upon it as a mere game at push-pin. Incision-knives will never discover the distinction between matter and spirit, or whether there is any or not. That there is an active principle of power in the universe, is apparent; but in what substance that active principle resides, is past our investigation. The faculties of our understanding are not adequate to penetrate the universe. Let us do our duty, which is to do as we would be done by; and that, one would think, could not be difficult, if we honestly aim at it.

Your university is a noble employment in your old age, and your ardor for its success does you honor; but I do not approve of your sending to Europe for tutors and professors. I do believe there are sufficient scholars in America, to fill your professorships and tutorships with more active ingenuity and independent minds than you can bring from Europe. The Europeans are all deeply tainted with prejudices, both ecclesiastical and temporal, which they can never get rid of. They are all infected with episcopal and presbyterian creeds, and confessions of faith. They all believe that great Principle which has produced this boundless universe, Newton’s universe and Herschel’s universe, came down to this little ball, to be spit upon by Jews. And until this awful blasphemy is got rid of, there never will be any liberal science in the world.

I salute your fireside with best wishes and best affections for their health, wealth and prosperity.

{Letter to Thomas Jefferson, 22 January, 1825}”
― John Adams, The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson & Abigail & John Adams

“I should never be able to fulfill what is,I understand, the first duty of a lecturer-to hand you after an hour's discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the mantelpiece forever".”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“The Religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate. This right is in its nature an unalienable right. It is unalienable, because the opinions of men, depending only on the evidence contemplated by their own minds cannot follow the dictates of other men: It is unalienable also, because what is here a right towards men, is a duty towards the Creator. It is the duty of every man to render to the Creator such homage and such only as he believes to be acceptable to him.”
― James Madison, A Memorial And Remonstrance, On The Religious Rights Of Man: Written In 1784-85

“I am not a Virginian, but an American.”
― Patrick Henry

“Virginians don’t belong in Maryland for the same reason Marylanders don’t belong in Virginia. When we meet, it should be in DC where everyone is the same kind of nasty: feds.”
― Ian Kirkpatrick, Bleed More, Bodymore

“Congrats on the tattoo... and the fish.”
― Jessica Pennington, Love Songs & Other Lies

“All my life, I've tamed myself to not frighten others. Sometimes it is fun to let the lion out.”
― Pierce Brown, Dark Age

“North Carolina and Virginia are probably two of the most business friendly states in the USA.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr, CEO of Mayflower-Plymouth

“Hauntingly active as they share space with the living, the dead refuse to give up their undead residency.”
― Pamela K. Kinney, Paranormal Petersburg, Virginia, and the Tri-Cities Area

“I am an aristocrat: I love liberty, I hate equality.”
― John Randolph

“God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that His justice cannot sleep forever. Commerce between master and slave is despotism. Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free. Establish the law for educating the common people. This it is the business of the state to effect and on a general plan.”
― Thomas Jefferson, A Summary View of the Rights of British America. Reprinted from the Original Ed

“But since these rolls of bread and wine bottles are needed by me, and your faces with their hollows and prominences are beautiful, and the table-cloth and its yellow stain, far from being allowed to spread in wider and wider circles of understanding that may at last (so I dream, falling off the edge of the earth at night when my bed floats suspended) embrace the entire world, I must go through the antics of the individual. I must start when you pluck at me with your children, your poems, your chilblains or whatever it is that you do and suffer. But I am not deluded. After all these callings hither and thither, these pluckings and searchings, I shall fall alone through this thin sheet into gulfs of fire. And you will not help me. More cruel than the old torturers, you will let me fall, and will tear me to pieces when I am fallen. Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“Mrs. Porter was from Virginia and had a smooth-as-cat-fur way of speaking. She taught me how to say, “Fiddle-Dee-Dee,” just like Scarlett O’Hara and she made her split-pea soup with bacon and even let me try on her lipstick sometimes as she teased up my hair in the same sixties style she wore, “Ala Pricilla Presley,” whoever that was.”
― Shannon Celebi, 1:32 P.M.

“The only thing here was a long gray ribbon of road, stretched like tape stuck by a toddler onto a rolling carpet of green hills under a huge arch of blue sky. This is Virginia. My Virginia, anyway.”
― Beth Harbison, Chose the Wrong Guy, Gave Him the Wrong Finger: A Novel

“In three years of backbreaking studies that, according to Madison, "exacted perhaps the most severe of Jefferson's public labors," Jefferson had almost single-handedly provided "a mine of legislative wealth" that provided Virginians with a modern republic built on the foundations of Greece and Rome. It became a model for other states and the pattern after which the federal republic of the United States was modeled. Jefferson, in short, in his legal laboratory atop Monticello, invented the United States of America.”
― Willard Sterne Randall, Thomas Jefferson: A Life

“For that matter I didn't understand Civil War reenactments. Why would you celebrate the biggest thing you ever lost? I quickly learned not to give voice to such skepticisms, and when asked if I was a Yankee I said I didn't follow baseball closely. That usually shut the person up.”
― Patricia Cornwell, Depraved Heart

“É sempre uma aventura entrar num espaço desconhecido, porque a vida e a personalidade dos que o ocupam vão infundindo nele as suas características, de tal modo que, assim que entramos, passamos a respirar novas formas de emoção.”
― Virginia Woolf, Street Haunting

“They were not, I am certain almost, first-rate gentlemen. (How different from our other officers.) But they are gone to Virginia, where they may sing, dance, and eat turkey hash and fry'd hominy all day long, if they choose.”
― Sally Wister, Sally Wister's Journal: A True Narrative Being A Quaker Maiden's Account Of Her Experiences With Officers Of The Continental Army, 1777-1778

“No doubt about it, society was small. Most human beings existed on the outer fringes of society. In the seventeenth century, for example, at least twenty percent of the merchandise on every slave ship died. By that I mean the dark-skinned people who were being transported for sale, to Virginia, say. And that didn't get anyone upset or make headlines in the Virginia papers or make anyone go out and call for the ship captain to be hanged. But if a plantation owner went crazy and killed his neighbor and then went galloping back home, dismounted, and promptly killed his wife, two deaths in total, Virginia society spent the next six months in fear, and the legend of the murderer on horseback might linger for generations.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“The dilemma of choosing our identity is an ongoing progress that forces us…to decide consciously or unconsciously the direction in which we will expend our energy.”
― Lois Benjamin, The Black Elite: Still Facing the Color Line in the Twenty-First Century

“I personally believe in the power of second chances.”
― Terry McAuliffe

“Look, Hell is taking over Richmond, and soon, Virginia, not long after, the U.S., and from there, maybe the world. So, get over it. Larry is not fake. He's a demon, plain and simple, but maybe you can't comprehend it. I know I couldn't at first. That means no more people checking out books, no more Christmas, cute fluffy kittens, no more anything good and right for humankind. Just demons, Hell, and the end of life as we know it.”
― Pamela K. Kinney, How the Vortex Changed My Life

“In the muddy area below, the men of Jamestown gathered. Their excitement was obvious in the way they greeted each other, the rapid pumping of arms and the boisterous slapping of backs. Heads nodded as they conversed and waited to mingle with the ladies who would soon be their help mates.
These men had pioneer spirits and courage. They had travelled to an unknown land to make a new life for themselves in a country where even the climate could kill.
When these adventurers had first arrived, trade had been established with the Powhatans. Then the fort had been built. Then another, after the Indian raids. Then, the men of God came, and disease came, and the first two women, followed by families, and then winter. Cold, deadly winter followed by four years of Indian wars, and the hollow ache of starvation. Still, year after year, the settlement had survived and one year after the ship, The White Lion, brought the first black people, the settlement was thought safe for women—European women. Wives!
It was a glorious day, for now each hard-working man could claim his bounty in female flesh. Of course, there would be opportunities to talk to a woman before making a life-binding decision, and there would be a celebration meal, ale and, no doubt, a dance.”
― Cheryl R. Cowtan

“Their house was full of books, letters, and mementos.”
― Zena Alkayat, Virginia Woolf: An Illustrated Biography

“I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness... I don't think two people could have been happier... I can't go on spoiling your life any longer.”
― Zena Alkayat, Jane Austen: An Illustrated Biography

“Robert E. Lee is America's great tragic hero, in the classical use of the term, doomed by a fatal flaw in one of his cardinal virtues, loyalty. He was a marvelously gifted soldier and an ardently devoted patriot, yet he defended the most unacceptable of American causes, secession and slavery, and he suffered the most un-American of experiences, defeat.”
― Charles P. Roland

“Ben Casper is an experienced firefighter who spent 20 years in this highly challenging career. He first worked in voluntary roles before landing a full-time paid position in Virginia. Steve Benedict Casper is proud of his lengthy career in this highly rewarding sector and considers it to be one of his best choices.”
― Ben Casper

“Scotland's contribution to American balladry is a subject which was either glossed over or neglected entirely by Cecil Sharp, the English folklorist and ballad collector, when he came over to the United States in search of traditional song poetry. Over here we are indebted to Sharp and to Miss Maud Karpeles for exploring the back country and helping us find what we had. Their visits were fruitful and their English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians is an exemplary work. But it is regrettable that a Scottish folklorist, familiar and in tune with Lowland traditions, was not close at hand to make a few claims of his own.

Somebody needed to suggest that Scotland had as good a claim to half the British ballads Sharp collected in Tennessee, Virginia and North Carolina as England has. Somebody might have suggested that English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians is a misleading title - that British Folk Songs would have been more accurate. For, after all, the most authoritative editor in the business, Francis J. Child, had clearly recognised two national traditions in his monumental English and Scottish Popular Ballads, which is the keystone work on which all subsequent studies have been based.”
― Herschel Gower, Saltire Review 20, Spring 1960

“The human mind is too apt to rush from one extreme to another. -- Richard Henry Lee”
― Harlow Giles Unger, First Founding Father: Richard Henry Lee and the Call to Independence