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

Money and art are far apart.

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed – Let it be that great strong land of love Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme That any man be crushed by one above.

Gather up In the arms of your love—Those who expect No love from above.

Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.

Like a welcome summer rain, humor may suddenly cleanse and cool the earth, the air and you.

Everybody should take each other as they are, white, black, Indians, Creole. Then there would be no prejudice, nations would get along.

I wish the rent Was heaven sent.

A dog gets lonesome just like a human. He wants to associate with other dogs, but when they take him out, the poor dog is on a leash and cannot run around.

I am a Negro: Black as the night is black, Black like the depths of my Africa.

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

I’ve known rivers: I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

My seeking has been to explain and illuminate the Negro condition in America and obliquely that of all human kind.

If the government can set aside some spot for a elk to be a elk without being bothered, or a buffalo to be a buffalo without being shot down, there ought to be some place where a Negro can be a Negro without being Jim Crowed.

Gather quickly Out of darkness All the songs you know And throw them at the sun Before they melt Like snow.

Life is a system of half-truths and lies, Opportunistic, convenient evasion.

One of the great difficulties about being a member of a minority race is that so many kindhearted, well-meaning bores gather around to help.

Latinos are here to stay. As citizen Raquel, I’m proud to be Latina.

I was born in a lovely white house with a garden.

The solitude is taking me home.

I am one of the sort that lives by throwing stones at other people’s glass houses, but I never mean to put up one for them to stone.

Give a little kindness, everyone houses some kind of pain.

This world is all we have.

Spring rain leaking through the roof dripping from the wasps’ nest.

I think every family should have a dog; it is like having a perpetual baby; it is the plaything and crony of the whole house. It keeps them all young.