For my best poems were all written when I felt the worst. When I was happy, I didn’t write anything.
Life for me has not been a crystal stair.
Beauty for some provides escape, who gain a happiness in eyeing the gorgeous buttocks of the ape or Autumn sunsets exquisitely dying.
There’s a certain amount of traveling in a dream deferred.
When you turn the corner And you run into yourself Then you know that you have turned All the corners that are left.
When I were a young man, I used to play baseball and steal bases just like Jackie Robinson. If the empire would rule me out, I would get mad and hit the empire.
If the government can set aside some spot for a elk to be a elk without being bothered, or a buffalo to be a buffalo without being shot down, there ought to be some place where a Negro can be a Negro without being Jim Crowed.
Everybody should take each other as they are, white, black, Indians, Creole. Then there would be no prejudice, nations would get along.
When poems stop talking about the moon and begin to mention poverty, trade unions, color, color lines and colonies, somebody tells the police.
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.