Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
It is one of the blessings of this world that few people see visions and dream dreams.
Nothing that God ever made is the same thing to more than one person. That is natural.
There is nothing to make you like other human beings so much as doing things for them.
Look lak she been livin' through uh hundred years in January without one day of spring.
Don't you love nobody better'n you do yo'self. Do, you'll be dying befo' yo' time is out.
I love myself when I am laughing. . . and then again when I am looking mean and impressive.
The Haitian people are gentle and lovable except for their enormous and unconscious cruelty.
It was a weak spot in any nation to have a large body of disaffected people within its confusion.
She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie’s first dream was dead, so she became a woman.
Oh to be a pear tree – any tree in bloom! With kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world!
But as de old folk always say, Ah'm born but Ah ain't dead. No tellin' whut Ah'm liable tuh do yet.
Perhaps love is a compelling necessity imposed on man by God that has something to do with suffering
Janie looked down on him and felt a self-crushing love. So her soul crawled out from its hiding place.
It's a funny thing, the less people have to live for, the less nerve they have to risk losing nothing.
She didn't read books so she didn't know that she was the world and the heavens boiled down to a drop.
So the brother in black offers to these United States the source of courage that endures, and laughter.
It is a curious thing to be a woman in the Caribbean after you have been a woman in these United States.
I made up my mind to keep my feelings to myself since they did not seem to matter to anyone else but me.
To me, bitterness is the under-arm odor of wishful weakness. It is the graceless acknowledgment of defeat.
Her old thoughts were going to come in handy now, but new words would have to be made and said to fit them.
Women forget all the things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget.
I have a strong suspicion . that much that passes for constant love is a golded- up moment walking in its sleep.
It seems like the first law of Nature is that everybody likes to receive things, but nobody likes to feel grateful.
If it was so honorable and glorious to be black, why was it the yellow-skinned people among us had so much prestige?
He was the average mortal. It troubled him to get used to the world one way and then suddenly have it turn different.
If you kin see de light at daybreak, you don't keer if you die at dusk. It's so many people never seen de light at all.
Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves. It fails to register depression with me.
The sun, the hero of every day, the impersonal old man that beams as brightly on death as on birth, came up every morning.
I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all.
Everybody is two beings: one lives and flourishes in the daylight and stands guard. The other being walks and howls at night.
Two things everybody's got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin' fuh theyselves.
If you want that good feeling that comes from doing things for other folks then you have to pay for it in abuse and misunderstanding.
So she sat on the porch and watched the moon rise. Soon its amber fluid was drenching the earth, and quenching the thirst of the day.
I wish I could buy you for what you are really worth and sell you for what you think you're worth. I sure would make money on the deal.
My sense of humor will always stand in the way of my seeing myself, my family, my race or my nation as the whole intent of the universe.
They bowed down to him rather, because he was all of these things, and then again he was all of these things because the town bowed down.
Love, I find, is like singing. Everybody can do enough to satisfy themselves, though it may not impress the neighbors as being very much.
But for the national welfare, it is urgent to realize that the minorities do think, and think about something other than the race problem.
Love is lak de sea. It’s uh movin’ thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it’s different with every shore.
Friendship is a mysterious and ocean-bottom thing. Who can know the outer ranges of it? Perhaps no human being has ever explored its limits.
I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard, in my search for reality, rather than climb upon the rattling wagon of wishful illusions.
Perhaps I am just a coward who loves to laugh at life better than I do cry with it. But when I do get to crying, boy, I can roll a mean tear.
Through indiscriminate suffering men know fear, and fear is the most divine emotion. It is the stones for altars and the beginning of wisdom.
We must learn to be honest with ourselves, and know our shortcomings. We will acquire cohesion but we will pay dearly for being a slow pupil.
Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to 'jump at the sun.' We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground.
Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches
Like the dead-seeming, cold rocks, I have memories within that came out of the material that went to make me. Time and place have had their say.
There is no single face in nature, because every eye that looks upon it, sees it from its own angle. So every man's spice-box seasons his own food.
Grown people know that they do not always know the way of things, and even if they think they know, they do not know where and how they got the proof.
I am her friend, and her tongue is in my mouth. I can speak her sentiments for her, though Ethel Waters can do very well indeed in speaking for herself.