Quotes from Michelle Moran

I would survive this. I'd survived worse things. After all, I was bamboo, and bamboo bends. It doesn't break.

No Hapsburg princesse could legitimize a woman of unguarded morals. If du Barry had possessed any sense, she would have seen that she was the mistress of the past while Antoinette was the princesse of the future.

it doesn't make sense." He is frustrated. "It doesn't have to," I tell him. "You must simply learn the rules and obey." "Is that what liberty means?" he asks earnestly. The three of us are silent. "No," I say. "That is what tyranny means.

Yes. I know all about how the French burned my people alive in cauldrons of molasses. How they mutilated and tortured Haitian prisoners, digging pits on the beach and waiting for the tide to roll in so they would drown. In Port-au-Prince," I tell them, "the emperor's soldiers invited all mulâtres to a ball. Then at the stroke of midnight, he announced that the men would be put to death. They killed them right there, in front of their wives.

One second, one, is all that separates life from death.

however peaceful you may wish to be, we all have the responsibility to rise up against evil.

I was becoming a tree rooted in the soil of tragedy, he said, and with every fresh reading I was watering the roots, sinking deeper, allowing my pain to grow stronger. "Plant your roots in fresh soil," he told me. And so my words were shut away.

My people," she began formally. "Main Jhansi nahin doongi!

To speak the name of the dead is to make them live again- Egyptian Proverb