1. “I loved my friend, he went away from me. There’s nothing more to say. The poem ends, soft as it began. I loved my friend.”
2. “Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.”
3. “What happens to a dream deferred?”
4. “Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.”
5. “Life is for the living. Death is for the dead.”
6. “Let life be like music, and death a note unsaid.”
7. “Folks, I’m telling you, birthing is hard and dying is mean—so get yourself a little loving in between.”
8. “Let the rain kiss you. Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops.”
9. “Let America be America again. Let it be the dream it used to be.”
10. “I’m so tired of waiting, aren’t you, for the world to become good, and beautiful, and kind?”
11. “I have discovered, in life, that there are ways of getting almost anywhere you want to go, if you really want to go.”
12. “I tire of hearing people say, ‘Let things take their course.’”
13. “Tomorrow is another day. I do not need my freedom when I’m dead. I cannot live on tomorrow’s bread.”
14. “Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—let it be that great, strong land of love where kings never connive nor tyrants scheme—that any man be crushed by one above.”
15. “Let America be America, where equality is in the air we breathe.”
16. “Negroes—sweet and docile, meek, humble, and kind. Beware the day they change their mind.”
17. “I stay cool, and dig all the jive. That’s the way I stay alive. My motto—as I live and learn, is dig and be dug in return.”
18. “Gather out of star-dust, Earth-dust, cloud-dust, storm-dust, and splinters of hail; one handful of dream-dust, not for sale.”
19. “When a man starts out to build a world, he starts first with himself.”
20. “Good morning, revolution. You’re the very best friend I ever had. We are gonna pal around together from now on.”
21. “Keep your hand on the plow. Hold on.”
22. “Peace—we passed their graves. The dead men there, winners or losers, did not care. In the dark, they could not see who had gained the victory.”
23. “I am a Negro—black as the night is black, black like the depths of my Africa.”
24. “O, let my land be a land where liberty is crowned with no false patriotic wreath, but opportunity is real, and life is free—equality is in the air we breathe.”
25. “There are words like freedom, sweet and wonderful to say. In my heartstrings, freedom sings all day everyday. There are words like liberty, that almost make me cry. If you had known what I know, you would know why.”
26. “That justice is a blind goddess is a thing to which we black are wise. Her bandage hides two festering sores that once perhaps were eyes.”
27. “I look at my own body with no longer blind, and I see that my own hands can make the world that’s in my mind.”
28. “Well, when Christ comes back this time, I hope He comes back and makes His own self. I hope He drives the Jim Crows out of their high places—every living last one of them from Washington to Texas.”
29. “Frosting freedom is just frosting on somebody else’s cake, and so must be till we learn how to bake.”
30. “The depression brought everybody down a peg or two, and the Negro had but few pegs to fall.”
31. “A world I dream where black or white, whatever race you be, will share the bounties of the earth and every man is free.”
32. “America never was America to me, and yet, I swear this oath—America will be!”
33. “I swear to the Lord, I still can’t see why Democracy means everybody but me.”
34. “I am the American heartbreak—the rock on which freedom stumped its toe.”
35. “There is no color line in death.”
36. “Democracy will not come today, this year, nor ever, through compromise and fear.”
37. “If you want to honor me, give some young boy or girl who’s coming along trying to create arts, and write, and compose, and sing, and act, and paint, and dance, and make something out of the beauties of the Negro race. Give that child some help.”
38. “Misery is when you heard on the radio that the neighborhood you live in is a slum, but you always thought it was home.”
39. “Melting pot Harlem-Harlem of honey, and chocolate, and caramel, and rum, and vinegar, and lemon, and lime, and gall. Dusky dreams of Harlem rumbling into a nightmare tunnel where the subway from the Bronx keeps right on downtown.”
40. “Why should I want to be white? I am a Negro and beautiful!”
41. “We Negro writers, just by being black, have been on the blacklist all our lives. Censorship for us begins at the color line.”
42. “Good evening, daddy! Ain’t you heard the boogie-woogie rumble of a dream deferred? Trilling the treble and twining the bass into midnight ruffles of cat-gut lace.”
43. “The past has been a mint of blood and sorrow—that must not be true of tomorrow.”
44. “Gather quickly out of darkness all the songs you know, and throw them at the sun before they melt like snow.”
45. “Politics in any country in the world is dangerous. For the poet, politics in any country had better be disguised as poetry.”
46. “Politics can be the graveyard of the poet, and only poetry can be his resurrection.”
47. “Serve and hate will die unborn. Love and chains are broken.”
48. “These feet have walked ten thousand miles working for white folks and another ten thousand keeping up with the colored.”
49. “A dog gets lonesome just like a human. He wants to associate with other dogs, but when they take him out, the poor dog is on a leash and cannot run around.”
50. “Like a welcome summer rain, humor may suddenly cleanse and cool the earth, the air, and you.”
51. “Life is a big sea full of many fish. I let down my nets and pulled. I’m still pulling.”
52. “The calm, cool face of the river asked me for a kiss.”
53. “For my best poems were all written when I felt the worst. When I was happy, I didn’t write anything.”
54. “I went down to the river, I sat down on the bank. I tried to think but couldn’t, so I jumped in and sank.”
55. “Oh, god of dust and rainbows, help us to see that without the dust, the rainbow would not be.”
56. “I got the weary blues and I can’t be satisfied.”
57. “The rain plays a little sleep song on our roof at night, and I love the rain.”
58. “Life is a system of half-truths and lies, opportunistic, convenient evasion.”
59. “I’ve been scared and battered. My hopes for the wind are scattered. has frozen me, the sun has baked me. Looks like between ‘em they tried to make me stop laughing, stop loving, stop living, but I don’t care! I’m still here!”
60. “It’s such a bore being always poor.”
61. “Blues has the pulse beat of the people who keep on going.”
62. “Let the rain sing you a lullaby.”
63. “I wish the rent was heaven sent.”
64. “Humor is when the joke’s on you but hits the other fellow first before it boomerangs.”
65. “I stuck my head out the window this morning and spring kissed me bang in the face.”
66. “My soul has grown deep like the rivers.”
67. “I will not take ‘but’ for an answer. Negroes have been looking at democracy’s ‘but’ too long.”
68. “I’ve known rivers. I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.”
69. “Life doesn’t frighten me at all.”
70. “We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.”
71. “Hang yourself, poet, in your own words. Otherwise, you are dead.”
72. “I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the when company comes, but I laugh, and eat well, and grow strong.”
73. “I don’t dare start thinking in the morning. I don’t dare start thinking in the morning. If I thought thoughts in bed, those thoughts would bust my head—so I don’t dare start thinking in the morning.”
74. “ lived to see the harvest.”
75. “Books—where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas.”
76. “One of the great difficulties about being a member of a minority race is that so many kind hearted, well-meaning bores gather around to help.”
77. “Beauty, for some, provides escape.”
78. “Wear it like a banner for the proud, not like a shroud.”
79. “Everybody should take each other as they are—White, Black, Indians, Creole. Then there would be no prejudice, nations would get along.”
80. “Never look for a worm in the apple of your eye.”
81. “When you turn the corner and you run into yourself, then you know that you have turned all the corners that are left.”
82. “When people care for you and cry for you, they can straighten out your soul.”
83. “Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love. I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.”
84. “For poems are like rainbows; they escape you quickly.”
85. “An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose.”
86. “Looks like what drives me crazy doesn’t have any effect on you, but I’m gonna keep on at it till it drives you crazy, too.”
87. “Love is a naked shadow on a gnarled and naked tree.”
88. “When poems stop talking about the moon and begin to mention poverty, trade unions, color, color lines and colonies, somebody tells the police.”
89. “Humor is laughing at what you haven’t got when you ought to have it.”
90. “Most musicians remain poor. But the music that they make, even if it does not bring them millions, gives millions of people happiness.”
91. “Out of love, no regrets though the goodness is wasted forever. Out of love, , though the return is never.”
92. “Though you may hear me holler, and you may see me cry, I’ll be dogged, sweet baby, if you’re gonna see me die.”
93. “I asked you, baby, If you understood. You told me that you didn’t, but you thought you would.”
94. “Hard as I try, daddy-o, I really do not like concert singers. They are always singing in some foreign language.”
95. “The rhythm of life is a jazz rhythm.”
96. “Whiskey just naturally likes me, but beer likes me better.”
97. “I don’t want no pretty woman. First thing you know, you fall in love with her, then you gotta kill somebody about her. She’ll make you so jealous, you’ll bust!”
98. “Sometimes, a crumb falls from the tables of joy. Sometimes, a bone is flung. To some people, love is given. To others, only heaven.”
99. “Cheap little rhymes, a cheap little tune, are sometimes as dangerous as a sliver of the moon.”
100. “Gather up in the arms of your love, those who expect no love from above.”
101. “The first of the month falls every month, too—North or South. And the white folks who send bills never forget to send them—the phone bill, the furniture bill, the water bill, the gas bill, insurance, house rent.”
102. “There’s a certain amount of traveling in a dream deferred.”
103. “It has seemed to me that most people are generally good—in every race and in every country where I have been.”
104. “Sometimes, I wish the public were equally aware of the men of our race in the cultural fields. You, for instance, have you ever bought a book by a Negro writer?”
105. “Money and art are far apart.”
106. “A picture, to be an interesting picture, must be more than a picture. Otherwise, it is only a reproduction of an object, and not an object of value in itself.”
107. “Both of them were very good and kind—the one who went to church and the one who didn’t. And no doubt from them I learned to like both Christians and sinners equally well.”