“With melted opals for my milk, Pearl-leaf for my cracker.”

We don’t ask a flower any special reason for its existence. We just look at it and are able to accept it as being something different from ourselves.

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.

When the milk of human kindness turns sour, it is a singularly unpalatable draught.

At an early age I sucked up the milk of Homer, Virgil, Horace, Terence, Anacreon, Plato and Euripides, diluted with that of Moses and the prophets.

I grew up eating hamburger helper, macaroni and cheese, and drinking lots of milk, and looked at lots of cows; but I feel like a New Yorker now, I’ve lived here for sixteen years.

Critic, relent!Your hope for repentanceWill meet with disapppointment.For this is the life,Not desert tents,Not camel’s milk!

O happy, golden age! Not for that rivers ran With streams of milk, and honey dropped from trees.

If others hurl their darts against you, offer them milk and honey in return; if they poison your lives, sweeten their souls.

To rankling poison hast thou turned in me the milk of human kindness.

There is no sense in crying over spilt milk. Why bewail what is done and cannot be recalled?