“What, what am I to do with all of this life?”

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.

If it’s not broken, break it. That’s how new discoveries are made. That’s why everything that changes life is called a breakthrough.

Honesty prospers in every condition of life.

Let the weight fall all there is to do is be here at all.

Whoever fails to turn aside the ills of life by prudent forethought, must submit to fulfill the course of destiny.

Some of the magical moments in our life are from the smallest moments.

Children are the anchors of a mother’s life.

If I had to do it all over again, would I want my dad here? I would say no. Our world is in a better place because our father gave his life.

Art imitates life and, sometimes, life imitates art. It’s a weird combination of elements.