Quote collection
215 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"There is something about poverty that smells like death. Dead dreams dropping off the heart like leaves in a dry season and rotting around the feet; impulses smothered too long in the fetid air of underground caves. The soul lives in sickly air. People can be slaveships in shoes."
"The present was an egg laid by the past that had the future inside its shell."
"Those that don't got it, can't show it. Those that got it, can't hide it."
"It seems that fighting is a game where everybody is the loser."
"I maintain that I have been a Negro three times--a Negro baby, a Negro girl and a Negro woman. Still, if you have received no clear cut impression of what the Negro in America is like, then you are in the same place with me. There is no The Negro here. Our lives are so diversified, internal attitudes so varied, appearances and capabilities so different, that there is no possible classification so catholic that it will cover us all, except My people! My people!"
"I did not just fall in love. I made a parachute jump."
"It's no use of talking unless people understand what you say."
"I belong to no race nor time. I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads."
"There is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sound and sight. Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought."
"She often spoke to falling seeds and said, "Ah hope you fall on soft ground," because she had heard seeds saying that to each other as they passed. The familiar people and things had failed her so she hung over the gate and looked up the road towards way off. She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie's first dream was dead, so she became a woman."
"They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God."
"Trees and plants always look like the people they live with, somehow."
"She was saving up feelings for some man she had never seen."
"Happiness is nothing but everyday living seen through a veil."
"Silence is all the genius a fool has."
"There is nothing to make you like other human beings so much as doing things for them."
"When God had made The Man, he made him out of stuff that sung all the time and glittered all over. Some angels got jealous and chopped him into millions of pieces, but still he glittered and hummed. So they beat him down to nothing but sparks but each little spark had a shine and a song. So they covered each one over with mud. And the lonesomeness in the sparks make them hunt for one another."
"Tell me, and then again show me, so I can know."
"We must learn to be honest with ourselves, and know our shortcomings. We will acquire cohesion but we will pay dearly for being a slow pupil."
"An envious heart makes a treacherous ear."