"It is one of the blessings of this world that few people see visions and dream dreams."

"When one is too old for love, one finds great comfort in good dinners."

"No man may make another free."

"Nothing that God ever made is the same thing to more than one person. That is natural."

"Gods always love the people who make em."

"People can be slave-ships in shoes."

"A thing is mighty big when time and distance cannot shrink it."

"There is something about poverty that smells like death."

"Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to 'jump at the sun.' We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground."

"It's no use of talking unless people understand what you say."

"Trees and plants always look like the people they live with, somehow."

"Love, I find, is like singing. Everybody can do enough to satisfy themselves, though it may not impress the neighbors as being very much."

"It seems to me that trying to live without friends is like milking a bear to get cream for your morning coffee. It is a whole lot of trouble, and then not worth much after you get it."

"I regret all of my books."

"Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place."

"So the brother in black offers to these United States the source of courage that endures, and laughter."

"The man who interprets Nature is always held in great honor."

"Anybody depending on somebody else's gods is depending on a fox not to eat chickens."

"The Haitian people are gentle and lovable except for their enormous and unconscious cruelty."

"It seems that fighting is a game where everybody is the loser."

"It's a funny thing, the less people have to live for, the less nerve they have to risk losing nothing."

"Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board."

"Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It's beyond me."

"If you want that good feeling that comes from doing things for other folks then you have to pay for it in abuse and misunderstanding."

"The present was an egg laid by the past that had the future inside its shell."

"Gods always behave like the people who make them."

"I do not weep at the world I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife."

"I did not just fall in love. I made a parachute jump."

"But for the national welfare, it is urgent to realize that the minorities do think, and think about something other than the race problem."

"Grab the broom of anger and drive off the beast of fear."

"Sweat, sweat, sweat! Work and sweat, cry and sweat, pray and sweat!"

"It would be against all nature for all the Negroes to be either at the bottom, top, or in between. We will go where the internal drive carries us like everybody else. It is up to the individual."

"Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose."

"I have been in Sorrow's kitchen and licked out all the pots. Then I have stood on the peaky mountain wrapped in rainbows, with a harp and sword in my hands."

"When a man keeps beating me to the draw mentally, he begins to get glamorous."

"It was a weak spot in any nation to have a large body of disaffected people within its confusion."

"There are years that ask questions and years that answer."