Sarah Patton Boyle Quotes - Quotes of Sarah Patton Boyle Poem Hunter

''If we love-and-serve an ideal we reach backward in time to its inception and forward to its consummation. To grow is sometimes to hurt; but who would return to smallness?''

Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 3, ch. 3 (1962).

''A mechanism of some kind stands between us and almost every act of our lives.''

Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 3, ch. 2 (1962).

''I have known no experience more distressing than the discovery that Negroes didn't love me. Unutterable loneliness claimed me. I felt without roots, like a man without a country ...''

Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 1, ch. 10 (1962). An affluent white Virginian who was cared for in her childhood by African American servants, Boyle was reflecting her eventual realization that many African Americans actually resented her.

''Service ... is love in action, love "made flesh"; service is the body, the incarnation of love. Love is the impetus, service the act, and creativity the result with many by-products.''

Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 3, ch. 3 (1962).

''The importance of a lost romantic vision should not be underestimated. In such a vision is power as well as joy. In it is meaning. Life is flat, barren, zestless, if one can find one's lost vision nowhere.''

Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 1, ch. 19 (1962). Boyle was a white Virginian who publicly advocated integration from the earliest days of the civil rights movement. The "vision" whose loss she lamented was that of sentimental, fully reciprocal love between white Southerners and the African American Southerners who served them. She had come to learn that this had always been merely a white illusion.

''A man's real and deep feelings are surely those which he acts upon when challenged, not those which, mellow-eyed and soft-voiced, he spouts in easy times.''

Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 2, ch. 13 (1962).

''... the constructive power of an image is not measured in terms of its truth, but of the love it inspires.''

Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 1, ch. 15 (1962). On African American resentment of such stereotypical figures as Uncle Remus and Ol' Black Joe, which whites still regarded with affection. Boyle, a Southern white who advocated integration in the 1950s, understood African Americans' resentment but thought it perhaps ill-advised.

''... two great areas of deafness existed in the South: White Southerners had no ears to hear that which threatened their Dream. And colored Southerners had none to hear that which could reduce their anger.''

Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 1, ch. 16 (1962). Boyle, a white Virginian, was remembering what the American South was like at the commencement of the 1950s civil rights movement.

''... in 1950 a very large slice of the white South stood at the crossroads in its attitude toward its colored citizens and [was] psychologically capable of turning either way.''

Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 1, ch. 8 (1962). Boyle was a faculty wife at the University of Virginia in 1950. When the university admitted its first African American student, Patton vocally supported the student and observed that many whites "whom I had not suspected of being liberal" privately expressed approval of her public stand.