85 Inspiring Quotes by Langston Hughes

We Negro writers, just by being black, have been on the blacklist all our lives. Censorship for us begins at the color line.

When peoples care for you and cry for you, they can straighten out your soul.

It's such a Bore Being always Poor.

My personal experience has been that in my 25 years of writing, I have not been asked to do more than four or five commercial one-shot scripts. These were performed on major national hook-ups but produced for me no immediate additional jobs or requests. One script for BBC was done around the world with an all-star cast.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I swear to the Lord, I still can't see, why Democracy means, everybody but me.

My writing has been largely concerned with the depicting of Negro life in America.

To my mind, it is the duty of the younger Negro artist, if he accepts any duties at all from outsiders, to change through the force of his art that old whispering 'I want to be white,' hidden in the aspirations of his people, to 'Why should I want to be white? I am a Negro -- and beautiful!'

Hold fast to dreams For when dreams go Life is a barren field Frozen with snow.

One of the great needs of Negro children is to have books about themselves and their lives that can help them be proud.

In all my life, I have never been free. I have never been able to do anything with freedom, except in the field of my writing.

I stuck my head out the window this morning and spring kissed me bang in the face.

I will not take "but" for an answer.

Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love.
I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.

So since I'm still here livin',
I guess I will live on.
I could've died for love --
But for livin' I was born.

Lawrence has a wonderful hill in it, with a university on top and the first time I ran away from home, I ran up the hill and looked across the world: Kansas wheat fields and the Kaw River, and I wanted to go some place, too. I got a whipping for it.

I was unhappy for a long time, and very lonesome, living with my grandmother. Then it was that books began to happen to me, and I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books -- where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas.

Good evening, daddy! Ain't you heard The boogie-woogie rumble Of a dream deferred? Trilling the treble And twining the bass Into midnight ruffles Of cat-gut lace.

Melting pot Harlem-Harlem of honey and chocolate and caramel and rum and vinegar and lemon and lime and gall. Dusky dream Harlem rumbling into a nightmare tunnel where the subway from the Bronx keeps right on downtown.

"Maybe you'll be better treated next time."
"Not as long as I am black," said Simple.
"You look at everything, I regret to say, in terms of black and white."
"So does the Law," said Simple.

Let America be America, where equality is in the air we breathe.

I, too, sing America.
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.
Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
"Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.
Besides,
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed --
I, too, am America.

The sea is a desert of waves,
A wilderness of water.

Pleasured equally
In seeking as in finding,
Each detail minding,
Old Walt went seeking
And finding.

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death, The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies, We, the people, must redeem The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers. The mountains and the endless plain -- All, all the stretch of these great green states -- And make America again!

The first of the month falls every month, too, North or South. And them white folks who sends bills never forgets to send them-the phone bill, the furniture bill, the water bill, the gas bill, insurance, house rent.

For poems are like rainbows; they escape you quickly.

Cheap little rhymes
A cheap little tune
Are sometimes as dangerous
As a sliver of the moon.

Yet the ivory gods, And the ebony gods, And the gods of diamond-jade, Are only silly puppet gods That people themselves Have made..

"But the way you talk, fun is first and foremost. You imply that there is no fun to be had around white folks."
"I never had none," said Simple.

That is no way to get Justice."
"That is the way the Allies got it -- breaking up Germany, breaking up Hiroshima, and everything in sight. But these white folks are more scared of Negroes in the U.S.A. than they ever was of Hitler..

"My boss is white," said Simple.
"Most bosses are," I said.

Jazz, to me, is one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America: the eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul -- the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world, a world of subway trains, and work, work, work; the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile.

Certainly there is, for the American Negro artist who can escape the restrictions the more advanced among his own group would put upon him, a great field of unused material ready for his art.

I am the American heartbreak- The rock on which Freedom Stumped its toe.

Anyday, one can walk down the street in a big city and see a thousand people. Any photographer can photograph these people -- but very few photographers can make their prints not only reproductions of the people taken, but a comment upon them -- or more, a comment upon their lives -- or more still, a comment upon the social order that creates these lives.

Now I do not understand
Why God don't protect a man
From police brutality.
Being poor and black,
I've no weapon to strike back --
So who but the Lord
Can protect me?

I do not want no pretty woman. First thing you know, you fall in love with her-then you got to kill somebody about her. She'll make you so jealous, you'll bust!

But there are certain very practical things American Negro writers can do. And must do. There's a song that says, "the time ain't long." That song is right. Something has got to change in America-and change soon. We must help that change to come.

A dog gets lonesome just like a human. He wants to associate with other dogs, but when they take him out, the poor dog is on a leash and cannot run around.

Consider me,
Descended also
From the
Mystery.

Well, when Christ comes back this time, I hope He comes back mad His own self. I hope He drives the Jim Crowers out of their high places, every living last one of them from Washington to Texas.

I dream a world... where wretchedness will hang its head and joy, like a pearl, attends the needs of all mankind. Of such I dream, my world!

O, let my land be a land where Liberty Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath, But opportunity is real, and life is free, Equality is in the air we breathe.

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.

Life is a system of half-truths and lies, Opportunistic, convenient evasion.

Don't come giving me, who's old enough to die and too near blind to create anything any more anyhow, a great big banquet that you eat up in honor of your own stomachs as much as in honor of me- who's toothless and can't eat.

Summer was made to give you a taste of what hell is like. Winter was made for landladies to charge high rents and keep cold radiators and make a fortune off of poor tenants.

Everybody should take each other as they are, white, black, Indians, Creole. Then there would be no prejudice, nations would get along.

The rain plays a little sleep song on our roof at night And I love the rain.

I wish the rent Was heaven sent.

Peace We passed their graves: The dead men there, Winners or losers, Did not care. In the dark They could not see Who had gained The victory.

The black women of America have as much right to all rights as white women have, without putting on any foreign robes to get them. I love Africa, but I was born in Florida, U.S.A., America. Of my African blood I am proud, but I want American rights. Of my black face I have no shame, therefore I have the right to want the right to show my face anyplace in America any other folks show their face.

Folks, I'm telling you, birthing is hard and dying is mean- so get yourself a little loving in between.

Politics can be the graveyard of the poet. And only poetry can be his resurrection.

Without going outside his race, and even among the better classes with their 'white' culture and conscious American manners, but still Negro enough to be different, there is sufficient matter to furnish a black artist with a lifetime of creative work.

Friend, I am thinking about money -- which goes beyond race. If all the Negroes in the world had money, the color problem would be solved in the morning.

A world I dream where black or white,
Whatever race you be,
Will share the bounties of the Earth
And every man is free.

Humor is when the joke's on you but hits the other fellow first -- before it boomerangs.

I've been scared and battered. My hopes the wind done scattered. Snow has friz me, Sun has baked me, Looks like between 'em they done Tried to make me Stop laughin', stop lovin', stop livin' -- But I don't care! I'm still here!

It is the duty of the younger Negro artist ... to change through the force of his art that old whispering "I want to be white," hidden in the aspirations of his people, to "Why should I want to be white? I am a Negro -- and beautiful!

I got the Weary Blues And I can't be satisfied.

Writing is like travelling. It's wonderful to go somewhere, but you get tired of staying.

There is no color line in death. I swear to the lord I still can't see Why Democracy means Everybody but me. O, yes, I say it plain, America never was America to me, And yet I swear this oath -- America will be! I am the American heartbreak- The rock on which Freedom Stumped its toe.

A picture, to be an interesting picture, must be more than a picture, otherwise it is only a reproduction of an object, and not an object of value in itself.

Good morning, daddy!
Ain't you heard
The boogie-woogie rumble
Of a dream deferred?
Listen closely:
You'll hear their feet
Beating out and beating out a -
You think
It's a happy beat?
Listen to it closely:
Ain't you heard
something underneath
like a -
What did I say?
Sure,
I'm happy!
Take it away!
Dream Boogie
Hey, pop!
Re-bop!
Mop!
Y-e-a-h!

Out of love,
No regrets -
Though the goodness
Be wasted forever.
Out of love,
No regrets --
Though the return
Be never.

Gather up In the arms of your love--Those who expect No love from above.

Misery is when you heard on the radio that the neighborhood you live in is a slum but you always thought it was home.

I look at my own body
With eyes no longer blind-
And I see that my own hands can make
The world that's in my mind.

As long as what is is-and Georgia is Georgia-I will take Harlem for mine. At least, if trouble comes, I will have my own window to shoot from.

What happens to a dream deferred?

Once, when I were a child, I were kicked by a small mule. Neither the mule nor I had any sense. I were trying to make the mule go one way, but the mule was trying to make me go another. I were for hitching the mule onto a plow. The mule were for nibbling grass. So, after that kicking, I learned right then and there to respect animals and peoples when they are not of the same mind as you are.

Even the 'Negro' shows like 'Amos and Andy' and 'Beulah' are written largely by white writers -- the better to preserve the stereotypes, I imagine.

When it is not on the side of civil rights, then the law is not right, it is white.

A community of hands to help- Thus the dream becomes not one man's dream alone, But a community dream.

A lion in a zoo, Shut up in a cage, Lives a life Of smothered rage.

I must never write when I do not want to write.