The truth is, no one of us can be free until everybody is free.
We must infuse our lives with art. Our national leaders must be informed that we want them to use our taxes to support street theatre in order to oppose street gangs. We should have a well-supported regional theatre in order to oppose regionalism and.
One isn’t born with courage. One develops it by doing small courageous things.
Loving someone liberates the lover as well as the beloved. And that kind of love comes with age.
Every day offers you 10,000 reasons to cry, but if you can find just one reason to laugh then you will be all right.
Poetry is music written for the human voice.
At our best, we are all teachers.
I think that that’s the wisest thing – to prevent illness before we try to cure something.
Children’s talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.
Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.
I have found that among its other benefits, giving liberates the soul of the giver.
In order to win, we pay with energy and effort and discipline. If we lose, we pay in disappointment, discontent, and lack of fulfillment.
Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told: ‘I’m with you kid. Let’s go.’
You think you may not be heard. Speak anyway.
My life has been long, and believing that life loves the liver of it, I have dared to try many things, sometimes trembling, but daring still.
As far as I knew white women were never lonely, except in books. White men adored them, Black men desired them and Black women worked for them.
The love of the family, the love of one person can heal. It heals the scars left by a larger society. A massive, powerful society.
Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible.
It is impossible to struggle for civil rights, equal rights for blacks, without including whites. Because equal rights, fair play, justice, are all like the air: we all have it, or none of us has it. That is the truth of it.
I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself.