Coffins by Rodman Philbrick

First, a note to anyone who may have found the author's name familiar (and the list is probably very small): This is the same man who wrote "Freak the Mighty."

Second, the book is set in 1861 in ME and is told from the POV of a Boston doctor who goes to help his dwarf friend's cursed family. The book was...weird. Really, that's the only way to describe. Historical fiction, but strangely preverse with hauntings and slave runnings and voodoo...one of those things you really just have to read.

Third, some quotes:

"It all began, I suppose, the day I first saw the abolitionist dwarf waddling across Harvard Yard."--Davis Bentwood, p. 18

"What then transpired was a collegial battle of wits that soon degenerated into the lowest form of argument, although we never actually came to blows."--Bentwood, p. 41

"I had read a rather odd book on the whaling industry by Hawthorne's friend Melville, but truthfully had not been able to make head nor tails of it, so loaded down was the story with heavy-handed symbolism."--Bentwood, p. 49

"It is amazing hos fast a man can strip when he believes his life may be at stake."--Bentwood, p. 69

"Not wanting to disabuse him of the notition that I, too, was cursed. That we had it in common, which ought to prevent my being shot by the dreadful weapon."--Bentwood, p. 74

"What I did not add, given the circumstances, was that Emerson's transformative ideas about communing with the God-within-us-all would not likely meet with the approval of, say, the local Methodists or Lutherans. Indeed, in an earlier age, they might well have burned him at the stake."--Bentwood, p. 82

"There are many such victims on the battlefield--whole armies of sleepwalking men--and they do not wake until the bullet strikes."--Bentwood, p. 95

"I hadn't the courage to pull the trigger. I'm a c-coward."
"Nonsense, you're the bravest man I now. It was courage that made you stop."--Jeb Coffins and Bentwood, p. 104

"Clinton, at thirty years of age the younger by a decade, had affected a pair of side-whiskers so large they made him look faintly ridiculous. Nothin he was to do or say in the next few days would alter that first impression."--Bentwood, p. 118

"Friends! Romans! Countrymen!"
"We shan't be lending you our ears. Our ears are wet and full of the sea."--Jeb and Frederick Douglass, p. 122

"I grew up in Boston, Hub of the Universe."--Bentwood, p. 172

"What lies they tell, and what infernal habits! But, I admit, very cheerful company."--Bentwood, p. 231

"It is the laugh of a man capable of anything, the laugh of a man who smiles gently while he fingers the skulls of those who have offended him."--Bentwood, p. 248

"My interests were mainly philisophical, academic, and utterly selfish."--Bentwood on civil rights movements, p. 274

"Would I denty to a sober if illiterate Negrothe privilege granted to a drunken and illiterate white man?"--Mrs. Stanton, through Bentwood, p. 277-8

"He is a politician and therefore shares the bloodline of ferret, weasel, wolf and serpent."--Mrs. Stanton, p. 278-9

"He was delighted to see me again, and straightaway wrung my hands with such enthusiasm that his spectacles went askey, which had the effect of making him look like he was about to tip over."--Bentwood, p. 284