What happens to a dream deferred?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

For poems are like rainbows; they escape you quickly.

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

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.

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.

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

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

It's such a Bore Being always Poor.

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

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.

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!

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.

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

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