Please note: These will not be the final recordings, but are selected to give the best "flavor" of the person.

 

EDGAR ALLAN POE

 

Now this is the point. You fancy me mad. Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen me. You should have seen how wisely I proceeded — with what caution — with what foresight — with what dissimulation I went to work! I was never kinder to the old man than during the whole week before I killed him. And every night, about midnight, I turned the latch of his door and opened it — oh, so gently! And then, when I had made an opening sufficient for my head, I put in a dark lantern, all closed, closed, so that no light shone out, and then I thrust in my head. Oh, you would have laughed to see how cunningly I thrust it in! I moved it slowly — very, very slowly, so that I might not disturb the old man’s sleep. It took me an hour to place my whole head within the opening so far that I could see him as he lay upon his bed. Ha! — would a madman have been so wise as this? And then, when my head was well in the room, I undid the lantern cautiously — oh, so cautiously — cautiously (for the hinges creaked) — I undid it just so much that a single thin ray fell upon the vulture eye. And this I did for seven long nights — every night just at midnight — but I found the eye always closed; and so it was impossible to do the work; for it was not the old man who vexed me, but his Evil Eye. And every morning, when the day broke, I went boldly into the chamber, and spoke courageously to him, calling him by name in a hearty tone, and inquiring how he had passed the night. So you see he would have been a very profound old man, indeed, to suspect that every night, just at twelve, I looked in upon him while he slept.

 

FREDERICK DOUGLASS

 

A new era is before us, and it may be marked with features darker and more calamitous than assassination and rebellion. Our national honor is in peril. The danger impending over us is the cold, cruel, wanton surrender and betrayal of our friends and allies – the only friends and allies that the South gave us as a nation. As a nation, then, we ought to be instructed, if judgments heavy and terrible can do it.

 

Yet soon we forgot the lessons of war, and treason and rebellion were already beginning to be thought of as slight offenses; a feeling of blind charity filled our hearts. Did this magnanimity soften the iron hand of slavery, or purify the heart of treason? No. It did not then; it does not now, and nothing but the stern hand of justice ever will. They seized the moment when we were weary of war, inclined to mercy, to deal upon the nation the heaviest blow it had yet received at their hands. We mourned Abraham Lincoln, not so much because the country had lost a president, but because the world had lost a man, one of the very best men that presided over the destinies of a nation.

 

TITUBA

 

REPLYING TO: "What shape or what is he like that hurts them?"

 

(Before the mid 1800s writing was not standardized, so it was written almost phonetically. We are not asking for a particular accent, as this should happen naturally from the way the lines are written)

 

Like a man, I think yesterday I being in the Lentoe Chamber I saw a thing like a man, that Tould me Searve him & I Tould him noe I would nott doe Such thing. she Charges Goody Osburne & Sarah Good as those that hurt the Children, and would have had hir done itt, she Sayth she hath Seen foure two of w'ch she Knew nott, she Saw them last night as she was washing the Roome, thay Tould me hurt the Children & would have had me gone to Boston, ther was .5. of them w'th the man, they Tould me if I would nott goe & hurt them they would doe Soe to mee att first I did agree w'th them butt afterward I Tould them I doe Soe noe more. Q. would they have had you hurt the Children the Last Night A. yes, butt I was Sorry & I sayd, I would doe Soe noe more, but tould I would feare God.

 

H.P. LOVECRAFT

 

We were sitting on a dilapidated seventeenth-century tomb in the late afternoon of an autumn day at the old burying-ground in Arkham, and speculating about the unnamable. Looking toward the giant willow in the centre of the cemetery, whose trunk has nearly engulfed an ancient, illegible slab, I had made a fantastic remark about the spectral and unmentionable nourishment which the colossal roots must be sucking in from that hoary, charnel earth; when my friend chided me for such nonsense and told me that since no interments had occurred there for over a century, nothing could possibly exist to nourish the tree in other than an ordinary manner. Besides, he added, my constant talk about “unnamable” and “unmentionable” things was a very puerile device, quite in keeping with my lowly standing as an author. I was too fond of ending my stories with sights or sounds which paralysed my heroes’ faculties and left them without courage, words, or associations to tell what they had experienced. We know things, he said, only through our five senses or our religious intuitions; wherefore it is quite impossible to refer to any object or spectacle which cannot be clearly depicted by the solid definitions of fact or the correct doctrines of theology.

 

DON PEDRO GIBERT

 

I protest damages, costs, injuries and deteriorations, and as much as in right belongs to me, against a Captain of His Britannic Majesty's brig. I make in my capacity of captain and master of the Spanish schooner called the Panda, the property of Bernado de Soto, of Havana, the same being made with the mate and crew of my vessel, for the reason that it could not be made at this time, in this place, in any other manner.

 

Boys we are going to die, but let us be firm, for we are innocent. I die innocent, but I'll die like a noble Spaniard. Goodbye brothers.