“Sometimes a crumb falls From the tables of joy, Sometimes a bone Is flung. To some people Love is given, To others Only heaven.”

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.

Well, when Christ comes back this time, I hope He comes back mad His own self. I hope He drives the Jim Crowers out of their high places, every living last one of them from Washington to Texas.

Keep your hand on the plow. Hold on.

The thankful heart will find, in every hour, some heavenly blessings.

God is the poet; men are but the actors. The great dramas of earth were written in heaven.

Of all the music that reached farthest into heaven, it is the beating of a loving heart.

I love judges, and I love courts. They are my ideals, that typify on earth what we shall meet hereafter in heaven under a just God.

By the blessings of heaven I mean to live and die, please God, in the faith of my mother.

When they throw punches, the breathing, the sparring. The heavy bags being hit. All of that – it was a heavenly sound to me.

Christ didn’t die just so you could make to heaven; He lives so you can make it through earth!

How much I daydream about heaven and how much I believe I’m going there are probably directly proportional.