“We’re all human, aren’t we? Every human life is worth the same, and worth saving.”

Depression is deadened feeling, which is so very different from feeling sad. Sad hurts but it’s a healthy feeling. It is a necessary thing to feel.

Sometimes ideas just come to me. Other times I have to sweat and almost bleed to make ideas come. It’s a mysterious process, but I hope I never find out exactly how it works.

To have been loved so deeply, even though the person who loved us is gone, will give us some protection forever.

What’s most important in a friendship? Tolerance and loyalty.

Depression is the most unpleasant thing I have ever experienced. It is that absence of being able to envisage that you will ever be cheerful again.

Numbing the pain for a while will make it worse when you finally feel it.

I will defend the importance of bedtime stories to my last gasp.

It matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be.

It matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be.

It is impossible to manufacture or imitate love.

When you have seen as much of life as I have, you will not underestimate the power of obsessive love.

Differences of habit and language are nothing at all if our aims are identical and our hearts are open.

We have to choose between what is right, and what is easy.

Poverty entails fear and stress and sometimes depression. It meets a thousand petty humiliations and hardships.

Achievable goals are the first step to self improvement.

Let us step into the night and pursue that flighty temptress, adventure.

I am a Negro: Black as the night is black, Black like the depths of my Africa.

When white and black meet today, sometimes there is a ready understanding that there has been an encounter between two human beings. But often there is only, or chiefly, an awareness that Two Colors are in the room.

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.

Why should I want to be white? I am a Negro – and beautiful!

One lady told me that before she saw ‘Sounder’ she didn’t believe black people could love each other, have deep relationships in the same way as white people.

A world I dream where black or white, Whatever race you be, Will share the bounties of the Earth And every man is free.

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.