Quotes by Rebecca Harding Davis

About Rebecca Harding Davis:

Rebecca Blaine Harding Davis is deemed a pioneer of literary realism in American literature. She graduated valedictorian from Washington Female Seminary in Pennsylvania. Her most important literary work is the novella Life in the Iron Mills, published in the April 1861 edition of the Atlantic Monthly which quickly made her an established female writer. Throughout her lifetime, Davis sought to effect social change for blacks, women, Native Americans, immigrants, and the working class, by intentionally writing about the plight of these marginalized groups in the 19th century.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Reform is born of need, not pity.

Rebecca Harding Davis

You were only truly patriotic if you had a laborer for a grandfather and were glad of it.

Rebecca Harding Davis

Sitting by the chimney corner as we grow old, the commonest things around us take on live meanings and hint at the difference between these driving times and the calm, slow moving days when we were young.

Rebecca Harding Davis

Crime, to the man of the forties, was an alien monstrous terror.

Rebecca Harding Davis

But, after all, we are a young nation, and vanity is a fault of youth.

Rebecca Harding Davis

No man surely has so short a memory as the American.

Rebecca Harding Davis

But remember, I am no politician, and no seer into souls.

Rebecca Harding Davis

The only hero known to my childhood was Henry Clay.

Rebecca Harding Davis

We have grown used to money. The handling, the increase of it, is the chief business of life now with most of us.

Rebecca Harding Davis

Our young people have come to look upon war as a kind of beneficent deity, which not only adds to the national honor but uplifts a nation and develops patriotism and courage.

Rebecca Harding Davis

TO preach a sermon or edit a newspaper were the two things in life which I always felt I could do with credit to myself and benefit to the world, if I only had the chance.

Rebecca Harding Davis

For, after all, put it as we may to ourselves, we are all of us from birth to death guests at a table which we did not spread.

Rebecca Harding Davis

I went to Concord, a young woman from the backwoods, firm in belief that Emerson was the first of living men. He was the modern Moses who had talked with God apart and could interpret Him to us.

Rebecca Harding Davis

North and South were equally confident that God was on their side, and appealed incessantly to Him.

Rebecca Harding Davis

It has happened to me to meet many of the men of my day whom the world agreed to call great.

Rebecca Harding Davis

Our village was built on the Ohio River, and was a halting place on this great national road, then the only avenue of traffic between the South and the North.

Rebecca Harding Davis

America may have great poets and novelists, but she never will have more than one necromancer.

Rebecca Harding Davis

The histories which we have of the great tragedy give no idea of the general wretchedness, the squalid misery, which entered into every individual life in the region given up to the war. Where the armies camped the destruction was absolute.

Rebecca Harding Davis

We don't often look into these unpleasant details of our great struggle. We all prefer to think that every man who wore the blue or gray was a Philip Sidney at heart.

Rebecca Harding Davis

It is a good rule never to see or talk to the man whose words have wrung your heart, or helped it, just as it is wise not to look down too closely at the luminous glow which sometimes shines on your path on a summer night, if you would not see the ug...

Rebecca Harding Davis

Author Bio

  • NameRebecca Harding Davis
  • DescriptionAmerican journalist
  • BornJune 24, 1831
  • DiedSeptember 29, 1910
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionJournalist; Novelist
  • WorksLife In The Iron Mills