Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings Quotes

“People adjust to their circumstances. People subject to the most barbaric cruelty can still delight in a baby’s laugh or feel moments of perfect contentment lying on a grassy hillside in the sun. There is something beautiful in our capacity to accommodate atrocity, even if it can also be our undoing.”
― Stephen O'Connor, Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

“We are judged... not by how we understand our words but by how our words are understood by others.”
― Stephen O'Connor, Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

“But nevertheless, it spoke, and I didn’t listen, and now I am damned. . .”
― Stephen O'Connor, Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

“. . . I am trying to tell the truth to its “teeth and forehead,” as Shakespeare says. Yet I am afraid that I am building a big lie out of tiny facts, that everything I say about who I was and how I lived will imply that I could have lived no other life, that I was entirely dispossessed of freedom of will. The simple fact that tortures me to this very instant is that I was never without freedom of will, that at any of countless junctures I could have said, “No,” and I would have lived a different life. Nothing was truly inevitable, and even when I didn’t know I was making a choice, I was—and I must bear the burden of those choices. Most troubling of all, however, are the times when I did know I was making a choice and a voice inside me told me that the choice was wrong but I didn’t listen—because I didn’t believe the voice, or I didn’t want to believe it, or because I couldn’t really hear it among a thousand other voices.”
― Stephen O'Connor, Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

“He was a democrat in practice as well as theory, was opposed to the slave trade, tried to keep it out of the Territories beyond the Ohio river and was in favor of freeing the slaves in Virginia.”
― Stephen O'Connor, Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

“He has a boiled egg and two glasses of cider at the posthouse while his horses are being changed. The hostler stamps the snow off his boots, scattering white chunks across the gray floorboards. “Everything’s ready, Your Excellency.”
― Stephen O'Connor, Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

“Marshall, gray-haired, storm-browed, is nevertheless a child sitting at a child’s desk. He folds his papers impatiently, stuffs them into a leather satchel and stands. “We are judged,” he says as he moves toward the door, “not by how we understand our words but by how our words are understood by others.” He opens the door, then slams it behind him, but its sound is obliterated by my booming laughter.”
― Stephen O'Connor, Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings