“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.”

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.

If you want to honor me, give some young boy or girl who’s coming along trying to create arts and write and compose and sing and act and paint and dance and make something out of the beauties of the Negro race-give that child some help.

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.

The rain plays a little sleep song on our roof at night And I love the rain.

Let the rain sing you a lullaby.

Yet the ivory gods, And the ebony gods, And the gods of diamond-jade, Are only silly puppet gods That people themselves Have made.

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.

Books -where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables.

I look at my own body With eyes no longer blind- And I see that my own hands can make The world that’s in my mind.

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.

LIBERTY! FREEDOM! DEMOCRACY! True anyhow no matter how many Liars use those words.

Go home and write / a page tonight. / And let that page come out of you – / Then, it will be true.

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.

Reach Up Your Hand… and take a star.

Life is for the living. Death is for the dead. Let life be like music. And death a note unsaid.

We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.

The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts.

Doubtless there are things in nature which have not yet been seen. If an artist discovers them, he opens the way for his successors.

Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.

There is too much fathering going on just now and there is no doubt about it fathers are depressing.

I never doubted that equal rights was the right direction. Most reforms, most problems are complicated. But to me there is nothing complicated about ordinary equality.

She quietly expected great things to happen to her, and no doubt that’s one of the reasons why they did.

At every sunrise I renounce the doubts of night and greet the new day of a most precious delusion.

No doubt the artist is the child of his time; but woe to him if he is also its disciple, or even its favorite.