"For my best poems were all written when I felt the worst. When I was happy, I didn't write anything."
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Quote collection
Langston Hughes quotes (page 4 of 9)
164 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The past has been a mint Of blood and sorrow. That must not be True of tomorrow."
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"Keep your hand on the plow. Hold on."
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"Politics can be the graveyard of the poet. And only poetry can be his resurrection."
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"Blues had the pulse beat of the people who keep on going."
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"I've known rivers: I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset. I've known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers."
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"Humor is when the joke's on you but hits the other fellow first -- before it boomerangs."
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"Money and art are far apart."
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"When poems stop talking about the moon and begin to mention poverty, trade unions, color, color lines and colonies, somebody tells the police."
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"Out of love, No regrets-- Though the goodness Be wasted forever. Out of love, No regrets-- Though the return Be never."
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"We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves."
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"They [the police] learned something from them Harlem riots. They used to beat your head right in public, but now they only beat it after they get you down to the station house."
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"Hang yourself, poet, in your own words. Otherwise, you are dead."
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"I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen when company comes, but I laugh, and eat well, and grow strong."
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"Through my grandmother's stories always life moved, moved heroically toward an end. Nobody ever cried in my grandmother's stories. They worked, or schemed, or fought. But no crying. When my grandmother died, I didn't cry, either. Something about my grandmother's stories (without her ever having said so) taught me the uselessness of crying about anything.""
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"Everybody should take each other as they are, white, black, Indians, Creole. Then there would be no prejudice, nations would get along."
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"Life is a big sea full of many fish. I let down my nets and pulled. I'm still pulling."
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"While over Alabama earth These words are gently spoken: Serve and hate will die unborn. Love and chains are broken."
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"I am a Negro: Black as the night is black, Black like the depths of my Africa."
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"Politics in any country in the world is dangerous. For the poet, politics in any country had better be disguised as poetry. Politics can be the graveyard of the poet. And only poetry can be his resurrection."
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