Magic is older than writing. So nobody knows how it started.
If it was so honorable and glorious to be black, why was it the yellow-skinned people among us had so much prestige?
I have a strong suspicion. that much that passes for constant love is a golded- up moment walking in its sleep.
The game of keeping what one has is never so exciting as the game of getting.
I am colored but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother’s side was not an Indian chief.
To a haughty belly, kindness is hard to swallow and harder to digest.
If science ever gets to the bottom of Voodoo in Haiti and Africa, it will be found that some important medical secrets, still unknown to medical science, give it its power, rather than the gestures of ceremony.
Africa has her mouth on Moses.
I was born in a Negro town.
To me, bitterness is the under-arm odor of wishful weakness. It is the graceless acknowledgment of defeat.
When I pitched headforemost into the world I landed in the crib of Negroism.
The North has no interest in the particular Negro, but talks of justice for the whole. The South has not interest, and pretends none, in the mass of Negroes but is very much concerned about the individual.
I note that the Africa loves to depict the grace of reptiles.
I thought that when they said Atlantic Charter, that meant me and everybody in Africa and Asia and everywhere. But it seems like the Atlantic is an ocean that does not touch anywhere but North America and Europe.
Like the dead-seeming, cold rocks, I have memories within that came out of the material that went to make me. Time and place have had their say.
The whole matter revolves around the self-respect of my people. How much satisfaction can I get from a court order for somebody toassociate with me who does not wish me near them?
Most things are born in the mothering darkness and most things die. Darkness is the womb of creation, my boy. But the sun with his seven horns of flame is the father of life.
To avoid the consequences of posterity the mulattos give the blacks a first class letting alone. There is a frantic stampede white-ward to escape from Jamaica’s black mass.
I am her friend, and her tongue is in my mouth. I can speak her sentiments for her, though Ethel Waters can do very well indeed in speaking for herself.
Perhaps love is a compelling necessity imposed on man by God that has something to do with suffering.