“What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or does it explode?”

When poems stop talking about the moon and begin to mention poverty, trade unions, color, color lines and colonies, somebody tells the police.

When a man starts out to build a world, He starts first with himself

Whiskey just naturally likes me but beer likes me better.

For my best poems were all written when I felt the worst. When I was happy, I didn’t write anything.

The depression brought everybody down a peg or two. And the Negroes had but few pegs to fall.

I dream a world… where wretchedness will hang its head and joy, like a pearl, attends the needs of all mankind. Of such I dream, my world!

We Negro writers, just by being black, have been on the blacklist all our lives. Censorship for us begins at the color line.

Misery is when you heard on the radio that the neighborhood you live in is a slum but you always thought it was home.

When peoples care for you and cry for you, they can straighten out your soul.

Hang yourself, poet, in your own words. Otherwise, you are dead.

Out of love, No regrets– Though the goodness Be wasted forever. Out of love, No regrets– Though the return Be never.

Pleasured equally In seeking as in finding, Each detail minding, Old Walt went seeking And finding.

Life dosent frighten me at all.

I stay cool, and dig all jive, That’s the way I stay alive. My motto, as I live and learn, is Dig and be dug In return.

Love is a naked shadow, On a gnarled and naked tree.

Everything there is but lovin’ leaves a rust on your old soul.

We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream; it may be so the moment after death.

While he lives, he must think; while he thinks, he must dream.

The cinema has no boundary; it is a ribbon of dream.

When you stroll through Munich it can happen that you suddenly stand in front of an old house, an idyllically-dreaming church that smiles like a friendly anachronism into our modern time.

You ever be having a really good dream, and then, uh- right in the middle of the dream you wake up, right in the best part of the dream? And there you are, back in your stinkin’ life again? Man, that’s rough, eh?

To the oppressed with no seat on the table; dreaming of change and better days, I will pull up a chair, and light fires in your name.

Anything one man can imagine, other men can make real.

In my dreams you conjure me like a spell in the night. Let us haunt one another with uneasy peace, and die burning alive.