they-sayers

Updated: June 21, 2025

Give me the pirate, who unfurls the black flag, emblem of his terrible trade, and shows the plank which your doomed feet must tread; but save me from the they-sayers of society, whose knives are hidden in a velvet sheath, whose bridge of death, is woven of flowers; and who spread, with invisible poison, even the spotless whiteness of the winding-sheet. "Gabriella, awake!"

Caroline Lee Hentz - Ernest Linwood: or, The Inner Life of the Author