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

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.

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.

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.

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

Let America be America, where equality is in the air we breathe.

It is really beautiful to hear I miss you from someone close to your heart.

I would warn you that I do not attribute to nature either beauty or deformity, order or confusion. Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused.

One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.

One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.

Beautiful people are not always good, but good people are always beautiful.

That pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating and the most intense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the beautiful.

How beautiful it would be if the poor could occupy in our hearts the place they have in the heart of God!

To God everything is beautiful, good, and just; humans, however, think some things are unjust and others just.