Life for me has not been a crystal stair.
Melting pot Harlem-Harlem of honey and chocolate and caramel and rum and vinegar and lemon and lime and gall. Dusky dream Harlem rumbling into a nightmare tunnel where the subway from the Bronx keeps right on downtown.
As long as what is is-and Georgia is Georgia-I will take Harlem for mine. At least, if trouble comes, I will have my own window to shoot from.
Misery is when you heard on the radio that the neighborhood you live in is a slum but you always thought it was home.
Hard as I try, daddy-o, I really do not like concert singers. They are always singing in some foreign language.
It were depression, too. They cut my wages down once at the foundry. They cut my wages down again. Then they cut my wages out, also the job.
While over Alabama earth These words are gently spoken: Serve and hate will die unborn. Love and chains are broken.
Democracy will not come Today, this year Nor ever Through compromise and fear.
Books -where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas.
It’s such a Bore Being always Poor.
I know how to handle women who act like ladies, but my landlady ain’t no lady. Sometimes I even wish I was living with my wife again so I could have my own place and not have no landladies.
These feet have walked ten thousand miles working for white folks and another ten thousand keeping up with colored.
I look at my own body With eyes no longer blind- And I see that my own hands can make The world that’s in my mind.
I was unhappy for a long time, and very lonesome, living with my grandmother. Then it was that books began to happen to me, and I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books – where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas.
The prerequisite for writing is having something to say.
Around the world-even in places where there is almost nothing, the rich, the beautiful, the talented, or the very clever can always get something; in fact, the best of whatever there is.
People up today and down tomorrow, working this week and fired the next, beaten and baffled, but determined not to be wholly beaten, buying furniture on the installment plan, filling the house with roomers to help pay the rent, hoping to get a new suit for Easter – and pawning that suit before the Fourth of July.
Hold onto your dreams.
What a difference a border makes: on one side of an invisible line, food; on the other side, none. On one side, peace. On the other side, war. On one side, quiet in the sunlight. On the other side the dangerous chee-eep, chee-eep, chee-eep, that was not birds, the BANG! of shells, the whine of sirens, and the bursting of bombs over crowded cities.
White folks sure is a case!” She laid three slices of bread on top of the stove. “So spoiled with colored folks waiting on ’em all their days! Don’t know what they’ll do in heaven, ’cause I’m gonna sit down up there myself.