Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Good morning, daddy! Ain't you heard The boogie-woogie rumble Of a dream deferred? • • • • You think It's a happy beat?
Looks like what drives me crazy Don't have no effect on you-- But I'm gonna keep on at it Till it drives you crazy, too.
I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen when company comes, but I laugh, and eat well, and grow strong.
Gather out of star-dust, Earth-dust, Cloud-dust, Storm-dust, And splinters of hail, One handful of dream-dust, Not for sale.
We Negro writers, just by being black, have been on the blacklist all our lives. Censorship for us begins at the color line.
The Jewish people and the Negro people both know the meaning of Nordic supremacy. We have both looked into the eyes of terror.
In all my life, I have never been free. I have never been able to do anything with freedom, except in the field of my writing.
Sometimes a crumb falls From the tables of joy, Sometimes a bone Is flung. To some people Love is given, To others Only heaven.
Yet the ivory gods, And the ebony gods, And the gods of diamond-jade, Are only silly puppet gods That people themselves Have made.-
Beauty for some provides escape, who gain a happiness in eyeing the gorgeous buttocks of the ape or Autumn sunsets exquisitely dying.
Most musicians remain poor. But the music that they make, even if it does not bring them millions, gives millions of people happiness.
Everybody should take each other as they are, white, black, Indians, Creole. Then there would be no prejudice, nations would get along.
Believing everything she read In the daily news, (No in-between to choose) She thought that only One side won, Not that BOTH Might lose.
That Justice is a blind goddess Is a thing to which we black are wise: Her bandage hides two festering sores That once perhaps were eyes.
Negro blood is sure powerful, because just one drop of black blood makes a colored man. One drop--you are a Negro! . . . Black is powerful.
It were depression, too. They cut my wages down once at the foundry. They cut my wages down again. Then they cut my wages out, also the job.
I dream a world... where wretchedness will hang its head and joy, like a pearl, attends the needs of all mankind. Of such I dream, my world!
One of the great difficulties about being a member of a minority race is that so many kindhearted, well-meaning bores gather around to help.
Peace We passed their graves: The dead men there, Winners or losers, Did not care. In the dark They could not see Who had gained The victory.
As long as what is is-and Georgia is Georgia-I will take Harlem for mine. At least, if trouble comes, I will have my own window to shoot from.
When poems stop talking about the moon and begin to mention poverty, trade unions, color, color lines and colonies, somebody tells the police.
This morning I paid seventy cents for two little old dried-up slivers of bacon and one cockeyed egg. It took me till noon to get my appetite back.
Even the 'Negro' shows like 'Amos and Andy' and 'Beulah' are written largely by white writers - the better to preserve the stereotypes, I imagine.
I've known rivers: I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
To create a market for your writing you have to be consistent, professional, a continuing writer - not just a one-article or a one-story or a one-book man.
A dog gets lonesome just like a human. He wants to associate with other dogs, but when they take him out, the poor dog is on a leash and cannot run around.
A picture, to be an interesting picture, must be more than a picture, otherwise it is only a reproduction of an object, and not an object of value in itself.
Sometimes I wish the public were equally aware of the men of our race in the cultural fields. You, for instance, have you ever bought a book by a Negro writer?
O, let my land be a land where Liberty Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath, But opportunity is real, and life is free, Equality is in the air we breathe.
When I were a young man, I used to play baseball and steal bases just like Jackie Robinson. If the empire would rule me out, I would get mad and hit the empire.
I do not want no pretty woman. First thing you know, you fall in love with her-then you got to kill somebody about her. She'll make you so jealous, you'll bust!
Good evening, daddy! Ain't you heard The boogie-woogie rumble Of a dream deferred? Trilling the treble And twining the bass Into midnight ruffles Of cat-gut lace.
I tire so of hearing people say, Let things take their course. Tomorrow is another day. I do not need my freedom when I'm dead. I cannot live on tomorrow's bread.
I felt very bad in Washington. . . I didn't like my job, and I didn't know what was going to happen to me, and I was cold and half-hungry, so I wrote a great many poems.
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed - Let it be that great strong land of love Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme That any man be crushed by one above.
Both of them were very good and kind - the one who went to church and the one who didn't. And no doubt from them I learned to like both Christians and sinners equally well.
Teach us all to do right, Lord, please, and to get along together with that atom bomb on this earth because I do not want it to fall on me-nor Thee-nor anybody living. Amen!
Summer was made to give you a taste of what hell is like. Winter was made for landladies to charge high rents and keep cold radiators and make a fortune off of poor tenants.
They [the police] learned something from them Harlem riots. They used to beat your head right in public, but now they only beat it after they get you down to the station house.
I know how to handle women who act like ladies, but my landlady ain't no lady. Sometimes I even wish I was living with my wife again so I could have my own place and not have no landladies.
We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they aren?t it doesn?t matter.
Certainly there is, for the American Negro artist who can escape the restrictions the more advanced among his own group would put upon him, a great field of unused material ready for his art.
Well, when Christ comes back this time, I hope He comes back mad His own self. I hope He drives the Jim Crowers out of their high places, every living last one of them from Washington to Texas.
I don't dare start thinking in the morning. I don't dare start thinking in the morning. If I thought thoughts in bed, Them thoughts would bust my head-- So I don't dare start thinking in the morning.
Politics in any country in the world is dangerous. For the poet, politics in any country had better be disguised as poetry. Politics can be the graveyard of the poet. And only poetry can be his resurrection.
Very early in life, it seemed to me that there was a relationship between the problems of the Negro people in America and the Jewish people in Russia, and that the Jewish people's problems were worse than ours.
The first of the month falls every month, too, North or South. And them white folks who sends bills never forgets to send them-the phone bill, the furniture bill, the water bill, the gas bill, insurance, house rent.
Melting pot Harlem-Harlem of honey and chocolate and caramel and rum and vinegar and lemon and lime and gall. Dusky dream Harlem rumbling into a nightmare tunnel where the subway from the Bronx keeps right on downtown.
Don't come giving me, who's old enough to die and too near blind to create anything any more anyhow, a great big banquet that you eat up in honor of your own stomachs as much as in honor of me- who's toothless and can't eat.
If the government can set aside some spot for a elk to be a elk without being bothered, or a buffalo to be a buffalo without being shot down, there ought to be some place where a Negro can be a Negro without being Jim Crowed.