“I once heard some idiot on the radio saying that all great art has suffering as its dominant theme, and that the greatest artists are only able to create because they suffer immensely in their own lives. What a bunch of bullshit.”

Look at Van Gogh’s paintings: there’s as much joy in them as there is pain. Suffering is only a single color, and by itself it’s boring.

Love attacks. It sneaks up like a pride of lions or a pack of hyenas and eats your heart out while you watch.

Love is raw, and violent, and instantaneous. You don’t fall in love; you get trampled by it.

It seems to be that loneliness is a small price to pay for peace and quiet.

Love is the bully on the playground who takes your lunch money and gives you a black eye in return, the arsonist who burns your house down with you in it, the witch who lures you into her home with candy and boils you alive for dinner.

He who puts a product upon the market as it demands, controls that market, regardless of color. It is simply a survival of the fittest.

The one place where a man ought to get a square deal is in a courtroom, be he any color of the rainbow, but people have a way of carrying their resentments right into a jury box.

Education, in the broadest of truest sense, will make an individual seek to help all people, regardless of race, regardless of color, regardless of condition.

As one sits here in summertime and listens to the cuckoo and all the other bird songs, the crackling and buzzing of insects, as one gazes at the shining colors of flowers, doth one become dumbstruck before the Kingdom of the Creator.

I wanted to know the name of every stone and flower and insect and bird and beast. I wanted to know where it got its color, where it got its life – but there was no one to tell me.

Someday she might replace whatever of her had gone away by some prosthetic device, a dress of a certain color, a phrase in a letter, another lover.

Summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screeneed porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the treehouse; summer was everything good to eat; it was a thousand colors in a parched landscape.

The United States has been called the melting pot of the world. But it seems to me that the colored man either missed getting into the pot or he got melted down.