All day long and all night through, One thing only must I do: Quench my pride and cool my blood, Lest I perish in the flood.

The truth is... everything counts. Everything. Everything we do and everything we say. Everything helps or hurts; everything adds to or takes away from someone else.

There is no secret to success except hard work and getting something indefinable which we call 'the breaks.

I was reared in the conservative atmosphere of a Methodist parsonage.

If I am going to be a poet at all, I am going to be POET and not NEGRO POET.

What is Africa to me: Copper sun or scarlet sea, Jungle star or jungle track, Strong bronzed men, or regal black Women from whose loins I sprang When the birds of Eden sang?

We shall not always plant while others reap

The key to all strange things is in thy heart..../ My spirit has come home, that sailed the doubtful seas.

My poetry has become the way of my giving out what music is within me.

We were not made to eternally weep.

Dame Poverty gave me my name, And Pain godfathered me.

When a moral man speaks, listen. But when immoral men speak, toss away their words like bad fruit. Truth will never shine from a heart filled with corruption and lies.

Every citizen must pray for its nation.

We enact many laws that manufacture criminals and then a few that punish them.

I can hurt myself more than anyone else can, she told her sister. I can do it with my eyes closed.

I place my hands over her ears and tip her head back, and kiss her, and try to put my heart into hers, for safekeeping, in case I lose it again.

But civlyzation doos git forrid Sometimes upon a powder-cart.

I prefer to have some beliefs that don't make logical sense.

humanity is a cancer on the body of the world

There is quite enough sorrow and shame and suffering and baseness in real life, and there is no need for meeting it unnecessarily in fiction.

Idleness is a mother. She has a son, robbery, and a daughter, hunger.