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.
If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.
It costs you something to do good!
So the brother in black offers to these United States the source of courage that endures, and laughter.
There is something about poverty that smells like death.
There is no single face in nature, because every eye that looks upon it, sees it from its own angle. So every man’s spice-box seasons his own food.
Grown people know that they do not always know the way of things, and even if they think they know, they do not know where and how they got the proof.
An envious heart makes a treacherous ear.
The sun had become a light yellow yolk and was walking with red legs across the sky.
Night came walking through Egypt swishing her black dress.
Every morning the world flung itself over and exposed the town to the sun.
When the people sat around on the porch and passed around the pictures of their thoughts for the others to look at and see, it was nice. The fact that the thought pictures were always crayon enlargements of life made it even nicer to listen to.
The spirit of the marriage left the bedroom and took to living in the parlor.
He was the average mortal. It troubled him to get used to the world one way and then suddenly have it turn different.
There is nothing to make you like other human beings so much as doing things for them.
So Janie waited a bloom time, and a green time and an orange time.
It was the meanest moment of eternity.
You’se something tuh make uh man forgit to git old and forgit tuh die.
She had an inside and an outside now and suddenly she knew how not to mix them.
She stood there until something fell off the shelf inside her.
Please God, please suh, don’t let him love nobody else but me. Maybe Ah’m is uh fool, Lawd, lak dey say, but Lawd, Ah been so lonesome, and Ah been waitin’, Jesus. Ah done waited uh long time.