“You, and those like you, take your fill of pleasure on earth by making the life of such as me bitter and black with sorrow; and then it is a fine thing, when you have had enough of that, to think of securing your pleasure in heaven by becoming converted!”

You ride well, but you don’t kiss nicely at all.

Some folk want their luck buttered.

A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all.

The business of the poet and the novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things.

My weakness has always been to prefer the large intention of an unskilful artist to the trivial intention of an accomplished one: in other words, I am more interested in the high ideas of a feeble executant than in the high execution of a feeble thinker.

If we be doomed to marry, we marry; if we be doomed to remain single we do.

It was still early, and the sun’s lower limb was just free of the hill, his rays, ungenial and peering, addressed the eye rather than the touch as yet.

Silence has sometimes a remarkable power of showing itself as the disembodied soul of feeling wandering without its carcase, and it is then more impressive than speech.

To dwellers in a wood, almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature.

Well, these sad and hopeless obstacles are welcome in one sense, for they enable us to look with indifference upon the cruel satires that Fate loves to indulge in.

It was then that the ecstasy and the dream began, in which emotion was the matter of the universe, and matter but an adventitious intrusion likely to hinder you from spinning where you wanted to spin.

If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.

Many have learned that the magnitude of lives is not as to their external displacements, but as to their subjective experiences. The impressionable peasant leads a larger, fuller, more dramatic life than the pachydermatous king.

I shall do one thing in this life-one thing certain-this is, love you, and long of you, and keep wanting you till I die.

If a path to the better there be, it begins with a full look at the worst.

She moved about in a mental cloud of many-coloured idealities, which eclipsed all sinister contingencies by its brightness.

The bus was among the first ways I realized there was a black world and a white world.

I wish to raise a Black man who will not be destroyed by, nor settle for, those corruptions called power by the white fathers who mean his destruction as surely as they mean mine.

Black holes are where God divided by zero.

Whenever someone refers to me as someone “who happens to be black,” I wonder if they realize that both my parents are black. If I had turned out to be Scandinavian or Chinese, people would have wondered what was going on.

Hating people because of their color is wrong. And it doesn’t matter which color does the hating. It’s just plain wrong.

Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.

Black Lives Matter. It is really that simple. Keep pushing. Keep listening.

When I find a colour darker than black, I’ll wear it. But until then, I’m wearing black!