“Mystery is the essence of divinity”

If you kin see de light at daybreak, you don’t keer if you die at dusk. It’s so many people never seen de light at all.

I will fight for my country, but I will not lie for her.

And I can’t die easy thinking maybe the menfolks white or black is making a spit cup out of you. Have some sympathy for me. Put me down easy, Janie, I’m a cracked plate.

People can be slave ships in shoes.

Honey, de white man is de ruler of everything as fur as Ah been able tuh find out. Maybe it’s some place way off in de ocean where de black man is in power, but we don’t know nothin’ but what we see.

She didn’t read books so she didn’t know that she was the world and the heavens boiled down to a drop.

An envious heart makes a treacherous ear. They done ‘heard’ bout you just what they hope done happened.

Night came walking through Egypt swishing her black dress.

She stood there until something fell off the shelf inside her.

Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to ‘jump at the sun.’ We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground.

The sun had become a light yellow yolk and was walking with red legs across the sky.

Love is lak de sea. It’s uh movin’ thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it’s different with every shore.

Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches

She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie’s first dream was dead, so she became a woman.

He looked like the love thoughts of women.

In the cool afternoon the fiend from hell specifically sent to lovers arrived at Janie’s ear. Doubt.

You can love a person dear to you with a human love, but an enemy can only be loved with divine love.

If there is anything that links the human to the divine, it is the courage to stand by a principle when everybody else rejects it.

There is no God any more divine than Yourself.

I have my own soul. My own spark of divine fire.

To write is human, to edit is divine.

We are all born with a divine fire in us. Our efforts should be to give wings to this fire and fill the world with the glow of its goodness.

God would seem to indicate to us and not allow us to doubt that these beautiful poems are not human, or the work of man, but divine and the work of God; and that the poets are only the interpreters of the Gods.

I swear to you, there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell.