“Exhaust the little moment soon it dies.”

When you love a man, he becomes more than a body. His physical limbs expand, and his outline recedes, vanishes. He is rich and sweet and right. He is part of the world, the atmosphere, the blue sky and the blue water.

When you use the term minority or minorities in reference to people, you’re telling them that they’re less than somebody else.

I believe we should all know each other, we human carriers of so many pleasurable differences. To not know is to doubt, to shrink from, sidestep or destroy.

Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies. And be it gash or gold it will not come again in this identical guise.

Don’t let anyone call you a minority if you’re black or Hispanic or belong to some other ethnic group. You’re not less than anybody else.

What I’m fighting for now in my work… for an expression relevant to all manner of blacks, poems I could take into a tavern, into the street, into the halls of a housing project.

We are each other’s harvest; we are each other’s business; we are each other’s magnitude and bond.

The poetry is myself.

The forties and fifties were years of high poet-incense; the language-flowers were thickly sweet. Those flowers whined and begged white folks to pick them, to find them lovable. Then the ’60s: Independent fire!

We real cool. We Left school. We Lurk late. We Strike straight. We Sing sin. We Thin gin. We Jazz June. We Die soon.

And if sun comes how shall we greet him? shall we not dread him, shall we not fear him after so lengthy a session with shade?

This is the urgency: Live! and have your blooming in the noise of the whirlwind.

People are so in need, in need of help. People want so much that they do not know.

I am interested in telling my particular truth as I have seen it.

I know that the Black emphasis must be not against white but FOR Black.

There are no magics or elves or timely godmothers to guide us. We are lost, must wizard a track through our own screaming weed.

Every consciousness pursues the death of the other.

One always dies too soon – or too late. And yet one’s whole life is complete at that moment, with a line drawn neatly under it, ready for the summing up. You are — your life, and nothing else.

Voiceless it cries, Wingless flutters, toothless bites, mouthless mutters.

You can bet everything will come to an end. It’s going to be ugly and it’s going to be a mess, and it’s going to be something that somebody did in the name of God.

If my body dies, let my body die, but do not let my country die.

Better to die on one’s feet than to live on one’s knees.

End? No, the journey doesn’t end here. Death is just another path. One that we all must take.

I want to die just once before my death so that I know what it feels like to be alive once again.