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

I think there are things for all of us to do as long as we’re here and we’re healthy.

I felt that I had to write. Even if I had never been published, I knew that I would go on writing, enjoying it and experiencing the challenge.

It is brave to be involved.

Sometimes you have to deal / Devilishly with drowning men in order to swim them to shore.

I tell poets that when a line just floats into your head, don’t pay attention ’cause it probably has floated into somebody else’s head.

Books are meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower steel, stitch, cloud and clout, and drumbeats on the air.

There can be no whiter whiteness than this one: An insurance man’s shirt on its morning run.

Abortions will not let you forget. You remember the children you got that you did not get.

Be yourself. Don’t imitate other poets. You are as important as they are.

She was learning to love moments. To love moments for themselves.

It frightens me to realize that, if I had died before the age of fifty, I would have died a ‘Negro’ fraction.

Good health is a duty to yourself, to your contemporaries, to your inheritors, to the progress of the world.

I like the concentration, the crush; I like working with language, as others like working with clay, or notes.

Even if you are not ready for day it cannot always be night.

Do not desire to fit in. Desire to oblige yourselves to lead.

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.

Tragedy is a tool for the living to gain wisdom, not a guide by which to live.

I have an instinct for music, or a feeling about it, and I’ll have my feelings guide my hands.

I have my golden retriever now, Pontiac. He’s a career-change guide dog from Guide Dogs for the Blind.

Love has always been the most important thing to me and the thing by which my life is guided.

The negro has within him immense power for self-uplifting, but for years it will be necessary to guide and stimulate him.

Progress, progress is the law of nature; under God it shall be our eternal guiding star.

For all of us Frenchmen, the guiding rule of our epoch is to be faithful to France.

If you ask the Universe to be your partner and guide you on the path to wholeness, it will oblige.