“My seeking has been to explain and illuminate the Negro condition in America and obliquely that of all human kind.”

“The only way to get a thing done is to start to do it, then keep on doing it, and finally you'll finish it.”

“I went down to the river, I set down on the bank. I tried to think but couldn't, So I jumped in and sank.”

“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.”

“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."”

“The soul of this man is his clothes.”

“Let me be that I am and seek not to alter me.”

“If I had my mouth, I would bite; if I had my liberty, I would do my liking. In the meantime, let me be that I am, and seek not toalter me.”

“I love a ballad but even too well if it be doleful matter merrily set down, or a very pleasant thing indeed and sung lamentably.”

“If it be true that good wine needs no bush, 'tis true that a good play needs no epilogue.”

“The object of Art is to give life a shape.”

“Alack, there lies more peril in thine eye Than twenty of their swords: look thou but sweet, And I am proof against their enmity.”

“Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?”

“For where is any author in the world Teaches such beauty as a woman's eye?”

“Boldness be my friend.”

“To fear the foe, since fear oppresseth strength,Gives, in your weakness, strength unto your foe,And so your follies fight against yourself.Fear, and be slain--so worse can come to fight;And fight and die is death destroying death,Where fearing dying pays death servile breath.”

“Ring the alarum-bell! Blow, wind! come, wrack! At least we'll die with harness on our back.”

“It now appears that the negro race is, more than any other, susceptible of rapid civilization. The emancipation is observed, in the islands, to have wrought for the negro a benefit as sudden as when a thermometer is brought out of the shade into the sun. It has given him eyes and ears.”

“The civility of no race can be perfect whilst another race is degraded.”

“Black men built the railroads, not blue eyes.”

“Let me be that I am and seek not to alter me.”

“If I had my mouth, I would bite; if I had my liberty, I would do my liking. In the meantime, let me be that I am, and seek not toalter me.”

“Simply the thing that I am shall make me live.”

“Let life be short, else shame will be too long.”

“Live in thy shame, but die not shame with thee!”

“Past all shame, so past all truth.”