Lifting as they climb onward and upward they go struggling and striving and hoping that the buds and blossoms of their desires may burst into glorious fruition ere long.

And so, lifting as we climb, onward and upward we go, struggling and striving, and hoping that the buds and blossoms of our desires will burst into glorious fruition ere long.

While most girls run away from home to marry, I ran away to teach.

Seeing their children touched and seared and wounded by race prejudice is one of the heaviest crosses which colored women have to bear.

Stop using the word 'Negro.' The word is a misnomer from every point of view. It does not represent a country or anything else ... I am an African-American.

It is only through the home that a people can become really good and truly great.

As a colored woman I might enter Washington any night, stranger in a strange land, and walk miles without finding a place to lay my head

To the lack of incentive to effort, which is the awful shadow under which we live, may be traced the wreck and ruin of scores of colored youth.

To the lack of incentive to effort which is the awful shadow under which we live may be traced the wreck and ruin of scores of colored youth.

I craved to make my faith as real as possible, which meant being recklessly honest in His presence.

One difference between the Bible and the Constitution is that we can still talk to the author of the Bible to discover original intent.

Love is like the truth sometimes it prevails sometimes it hurts.

You really want to make sure that you have fun, at the end of the day. If its not fun, whats the point.

One time on a dive, I wound up drifting up in darkness surrounded by billions of photoluminescent creatures. It was a religious experience, one only a poet could do justice to.

That's the test of street art – to see if anybody stopped. People would cross out ones they didn't like and would star others. I liked that people would engage with them.

After an eternity of seeking the sudden threshold of seeing and finding leaves one filled with a strange paradox of ecstasy and grief. I was born to see.

When I was at college there were two things I vowed I'd never do. One was go to a funeral and the other was deal with computers. And then I ended up being a computer programmer in a morgue.

Cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.

Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.