Robert E Lee/harpers Ferry and Texas 1859-61

Famous quotes containing the words robert e, lee, ferry and/or texas:

    My head gripped in bony vise
    of knees, the writhing struggle
    to wrench free, the blows, the fear
    worse than blows that hateful

    Words could bring, the face that I
    no longer knew or loved. . . .
    Robert Earl Hayden (1913–1980)

    I’d rather you shot at tin cans in the back yard, but I know you’ll go after birds. Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.... Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.
    —Harper Lee (b. 1926)

    What have Massachusetts and the North sent a few sane representatives to Congress for, of late years?... All their speeches put together and boiled down ... do not match for manly directness and force, and for simple truth, the few casual remarks of crazy John Brown on the floor of the Harper’s Ferry engine-house,—that man whom you are about to hang, to send to the other world, though not to represent you there.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    During the cattle drives, Texas cowboy music came into national significance. Its practical purpose is well known—it was used primarily to keep the herds quiet at night, for often a ballad sung loudly and continuously enough might prevent a stampede. However, the cowboy also sang because he liked to sing.... In this music of the range and trail is “the grayness of the prairies, the mournful minor note of a Texas norther, and a rhythm that fits the gait of the cowboy’s pony.”
    —Administration in the State of Texa, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)