9 Matching Annotations
  1. Mar 2026
    1. “I thought you were going to be an engineer yourself,” queried Philip. “Not many times, if the court knows herself. There’s better game. Brown and Schaick have, or will have, the control for the whole line of the Salt Lick Pacific Extension, forty thousand dollars a mile over the prairie, with extra for hard-pan—and it’ll be pretty much all hardpan I can tell you; besides every alternate section of land on this line.

      Harry's desire to become a wealthy railway contractor contrasts with Philip's honest way of living. Harry lays out the get-rich-quick mentality of the era.

    2. The Colonel’s tongue was a magician’s wand that turned dried apples into figs and water into wine as easily as it could change a hovel into a palace and present poverty into imminent future riches.

      The Sellers home is a place where dried apples are treated as luxuries, highlighting the disparity between Sellers’s imaginative wealth and his actual desperate circumstances.

    3. We’ve got to drag along, drag along, and eat crusts in toil and poverty, all hopeless and forlorn—but they’ll ride in coaches, Nancy!

      Silas accepts the chance of relentlessly working while never seeing the results if it means his children can reap the benefits that are sure to come. He's willing to ignore present misery for an imaginary future.

  2. Feb 2026
    1. But to live,—to wear on, day after day, of mean, bitter, low, harassing servitude, every nerve dampened and depressed, every power of feeling gradually smothered,—this long and wasting heart-martyrdom, this slow, daily bleeding away of the inward life, drop by drop, hour after hour,—this is the true searching test of what there may be in man or woman.

      Stowe directly presents Tom as martyr, as well as making his Christian faith strongly tied to his character. He represents the noble, long-suffering enslaved person whose faith is contrasted with the barbarism of slavery. His passive, Christian endurance and ultimate sacrifice highlight the cruelty of "kind masters," and solidify slavery as something that is never not cruel.

    2. Eliza made her desperate retreat across the river just in the dusk of twilight.

      Eliza's character is the first example we see of a mother whose young child is sold; her escape is described in such a way to make the readers put themselves in her shoes.

    3. these poor creatures love their children as much as you do me

      This is a message that Stowe herself is conveying through this novel; as she often tries to appeal to white mothers and white women at large by often emphasizing maternal love.

  3. Jan 2026
    1. The convulsive throes of the monster, even now, give evidence of deep wounds.

      The monster being the institution of slavery. While it was still very much active, it was showing signs of damage done by the abolitionist cause.

    2. Some of the scenes are not unworthy of De Foe himself.

      Daniel Defoe, a famous writer from the eighteenth century. His works have been translated into hundreds of languages.

    3. In the multitude that you have succored, it is very possible that you may not remember me; but until I forget God and myself, I can never forget you.

      Brown assumes that Quincy must have helped many people and therefore might not remember his interaction with Brown; and Brown equates the importance of remembering Quincy to remembering himself and God (the reference to God is further emphasized by his phrasing earlier, "I was hungry, and you fed me. Naked was I, and you clothed me," which resemble Bible verses).