Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by Langston Hughes, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring Langston Hughes quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 182 Langston Hughes quotes for you to read and share.

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God in his infinite wisdom
Did not make me very wise-
So when my actions are stupid
They hardly take God by surprise. -- Langston Hughes
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I will not take 'but' for an answer. -- Langston Hughes
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If the government can set aside some spot for a elk to be a elk without being bothered, or a buffalo to be a buffalo without being shot down, there ought to be some place where a Negro can be a Negro without being Jim Crowed. -- Langston Hughes
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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. -- Langston Hughes
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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. -- Langston Hughes
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Oppression
Now dreams
Are not available
To the dreamers,
Nor songs
To the singers.
In some lands
Dark night
And cold steel
Prevail
But the dream
Will come back,
And the song
Break
Its jail. -- Langston Hughes
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I know how to handle women who act like ladies, but my landlady ain't no lady. Sometimes I even wish I was living with my wife again so I could have my own place and not have no landladies. -- Langston Hughes
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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. -- Langston Hughes
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I'm so tired of waiting, aren't you, for the world to become good and beautiful and kind? -- Langston Hughes
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Gather quickly
Out of darkness
All the songs you know
And throw them at the sun
Before they melt
Like snow. -- Langston Hughes
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Never look for a worm in the apple of your eye. -- Langston Hughes
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I asked you, baby,
If you understood-
You told me that you didn't,
But you thought you would. -- Langston Hughes
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I felt very bad in Washington ... I didn't like my job, and I didn't know what was going to happen to me, and I was cold and half-hungry, so I wrote a great many poems. -- Langston Hughes
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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. -- Langston Hughes
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What happens to a dream deferred? -- Langston Hughes
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Life is for the living.
Death is for the dead.
Let life be like music.
And death a note unsaid. -- Langston Hughes
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Pleasured equally In seeking as in finding, Each detail minding, Old Walt went seeking And finding. -- Langston Hughes
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Love is a naked shadow, On a gnarled and naked tree. -- Langston Hughes
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The Jewish people and the Negro people both know the meaning of Nordic supremacy. We have both looked into the eyes of terror. -- Langston Hughes
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Justice
That Justice is a blind goddess
Is a thing to which we black are wise:
Her bandage hides two festering sores
That once perhaps were eyes. -- Langston Hughes
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I was a victim of a stereotype. There were only two of us Negro kids in the whole class, and our English teacher was always stressing the importance of rhythm in poetry. Well, everybody knows - except us - that all Negroes have rhythms, so they elected me class poet. -- Langston Hughes
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Believing everything she read
In the daily news,
(No in-between to choose)
She thought that only
One side won,
Not that BOTH
Might lose. -- Langston Hughes
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We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. -- Langston Hughes
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Of course Covarrubias wasn't a negro, but how he caught the darky spirit! -- Langston Hughes
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It's such a Bore Being always Poor. -- Langston Hughes
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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. -- Langston Hughes
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Tell all my mourners
To mourn in red-
Cause there ain't no sense
In my bein' dead. -- Langston Hughes
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Because my mouth Is wide with laughter And my throat Is deep with song, You do not think I suffer after I have held my pain So long? Because my mouth Is wide with laughter You do not hear My inner cry? Because my feet Are gay with dancing You do not know I die? -- Langston Hughes
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The calm, Cool face of the river, Asked me for a kiss -- Langston Hughes
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Color
Wear it
Like a banner
For the proud
Not like a shroud.
Wear it
Like a song
Soaring high
Not moan or cry. -- Langston Hughes
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Very early in life, it seemed to me that there was a relationship between the problems of the Negro people in America and the Jewish people in Russia, and that the Jewish people's problems were worse than ours. -- Langston Hughes
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The rain plays a little sleep song on our roof at night And I love the rain. -- Langston Hughes
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I don't dare start thinking in the morning. I don't dare start thinking in the morning. If I thought thoughts in bed, Them thoughts would bust my head
So I don't dare start thinking in the morning. -- Langston Hughes
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To create a market for your writing you have to be consistent, professional, a continuing writer - not just a one-article or a one-story or a one-book man. -- Langston Hughes
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Perhaps the mission of an artist is to interpret beauty to people - the beauty within themselves. -- Langston Hughes
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White folks sure is a case!" She laid three slices of bread on top of the stove. "So spoiled with colored folks waiting on 'em all their days! Don't know what they'll do in heaven, 'cause I'm gonna sit down up there myself. -- Langston Hughes
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For poems are like rainbows; they escape you quickly. -- Langston Hughes
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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. -- Langston Hughes
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Teach us all to do right, Lord, please, and to get along together with that atom bomb on this earth because I do not want it to fall on me-nor Thee-nor anybody living. Amen! -- Langston Hughes
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Gather up In the arms of your love - Those who expect No love from above. -- Langston Hughes
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The Dream Keeper
Bring me all of your dreams,
You dreamer,
Bring me all your
Heart melodies
That I may wrap them
In a blue cloud-cloth
Away from the too-rough fingers
Of the world. -- Langston Hughes
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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! -- Langston Hughes
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LIBERTY!
FREEDOM!
DEMOCRACY!
True anyhow no matter how many
Liars use those words. -- Langston Hughes
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Good morning, Revolution: You're the very best friend I ever had. We gonna pal around together from now on -- Langston Hughes
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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. -- Langston Hughes
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This morning I paid seventy cents for two little old dried-up slivers of bacon and one cockeyed egg. It took me till noon to get my appetite back. -- Langston Hughes
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Quiet Girl
I would liken you
To a night without stars
Were it not for your eyes.
I would liken you
To a sleep without dreams
Were it not for your songs. -- Langston Hughes
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The past has been a mint Of blood and sorrow. That must not be True of tomorrow. -- Langston Hughes
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America never was America to me And yet I swear this oath - America will be! -- Langston Hughes
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I live in Harlem, New York City. I am unmarried. I like 'Tristan,' goat's milk, short novels, lyric poems, heat, simple folk, boats and bullfights; I dislike 'Aida,' parsnips, long novels, narrative poems, cold, pretentious folk, buses and bridges. -- Langston Hughes
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An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose -- Langston Hughes
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Sometimes I wish the public were equally aware of the men of our race in the cultural fields. You, for instance, have you ever bought a book by a Negro writer? -- Langston Hughes
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Negroes
Sweet and docile,
Meek, humble, and kind:
Beware the day
They change their minds!
Wind
In the cotton fields,
Gentle breeze:
Beware the hour
It uproots trees! -- Langston Hughes
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The speaker catches fire
looking at their faces.
His words
jump down to stand
in listener's places. -- Langston Hughes
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I loved my friend
He went away from me
There's nothing more to say
The poem ends,
Soft as it began-
I loved my friend. -- Langston Hughes
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I got the Weary Blues And I can't be satisfied. -- Langston Hughes
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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. -- Langston Hughes
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This, the dream and the dreamer, wandering in the desert from Hopkinsville to Vienna in love with a streetwalker named Music. ... -- Langston Hughes
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Go home and write / a page tonight. / And let that page come out of you - / Then, it will be true. -- Langston Hughes
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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. -- Langston Hughes
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Frosting Freedom Is just frosting On somebody else's Cake
And so must be Till we Learn how to Bake. -- Langston Hughes
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I tire so of hearing people say, Let things take their course. Tomorrow is another day. I do not need my freedom when I'm dead. I cannot live on tomorrow's bread. -- Langston Hughes
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Writing is like travelling. It's wonderful to go somewhere, but you get tired of staying. -- Langston Hughes
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Humor is when the joke's on you but hits the other fellow first
before it boomerangs. -- Langston Hughes
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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. -- Langston Hughes
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I stay cool, and dig all jive,
That's the way I stay alive.
My motto,
as I live and learn,
is
Dig and be dug
In return. -- Langston Hughes
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I will not take 'but' for an answer. Negroes have been looking at democracy's 'but' too long. -- Langston Hughes
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There's a certain amount of traveling in a dream deferred. -- Langston Hughes
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Even to an outsider like myself, not only in the theatre was such disunity evident, but in much else in government Spain. Alvarez del Vayo, Socialist Minister of Foreign Affairs, once asked, Why is it Spain's people are so great, but her leaders so small? -- Langston Hughes
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While over Alabama earth These words are gently spoken: Serve and hate will die unborn. Love and chains are broken. -- Langston Hughes
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Afraid

We cry among the skyscrapers
As our ancestors
Cried among the palms in Africa
Because we are alone,
It is night,
And we're afraid. -- Langston Hughes
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How still,
How strangely still
The water is today,
It is not good
For water
To be so still that way.

~ "Sea Calm -- Langston Hughes
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I did not believe political directives could be successfully applied to creative writing ... not to poetry or fiction, which to be valid had to express as truthfully as possible the individual emotions and reactions of the writer. -- Langston Hughes
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Looks like what drives me crazy Don't have no effect on you
But I'm gonna keep on at it Till it drives you crazy, too. -- Langston Hughes
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One of the great difficulties about being a member of a minority race is that so many kindhearted, well-meaning bores gather around to help. -- Langston Hughes
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I am the American heartbreak- The rock on which Freedom Stumped its toe. -- Langston Hughes
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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. -- Langston Hughes
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If you want to honor me, give some young boy or girl who's coming along trying to create arts and write and compose and sing and act and paint and dance and make something out of the beauties of the Negro race-give that child some help. -- Langston Hughes
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Your explanation depresses me," I said.
"Your nonsense depresses me," said Simple. -- Langston Hughes
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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!' -- Langston Hughes
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I am so tired of waiting.
Aren't you,
for the world to become good
and beautiful and kind?
Let us take a knife
and cut the world in two
and see what worms are eating
at the rind. -- Langston Hughes
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To some people
Love is given,
To others
Only Heaven. -- Langston Hughes
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Because shoes got by devilish ways will burn your feet. -- Langston Hughes
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Though you may hear me holler, And you may see me cry
I'll be dogged, sweet baby, If you gonna see me die. -- Langston Hughes
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For my best poems were all written when I felt the worst. When I was happy, I didn't write anything. -- Langston Hughes
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Most musicians remain poor. But the music that they make, even if it does not bring them millions, gives millions of people happiness. -- Langston Hughes
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Let the rain kiss you. Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops. Let the rain sing you a lullaby. -- Langston Hughes
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Hold fast to dreams For when dreams go Life is a barren field Frozen with snow. -- Langston Hughes
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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. -- Langston Hughes
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Life is a system of half-truths and lies, Opportunistic, convenient evasion. -- Langston Hughes
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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. -- Langston Hughes
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Words Like Freedom
There are words like Freedom
Sweet and wonderful to say.
On my heartstrings freedom sings
All day everyday.
There are words like Liberty
That almost make me cry.
If you had known what I know
You would know why. -- Langston Hughes
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The rhythm of life is a jazz rhythm -- Langston Hughes
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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. -- Langston Hughes
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Folks, I'm telling you, birthing is hard and dying is mean- so get yourself a little loving in between. -- Langston Hughes
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My chief literary influences have been Paul Laurence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, and Walt Whitman. My favorite public figures include Jimmy Durante, Marlene Dietrich, Mary McLeod Bethune, Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Marian Anderson, and Henry Armstrong. -- Langston Hughes
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Yet the ivory gods, And the ebony gods, And the gods of diamond-jade, Are only silly puppet gods That people themselves Have made.- -- Langston Hughes
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Blues had the pulse beat of the people who keep on going. -- Langston Hughes
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Money and art are far apart. -- Langston Hughes
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Both of them were very good and kind - the one who went to church and the one who didn't. And no doubt from them I learned to like both Christians and sinners equally well. -- Langston Hughes
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Hang yourself, poet, in your own words.
Otherwise, you are dead. -- Langston Hughes
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Life is a egg you have to be patient and carefull with it or it will brake -- Langston Hughes
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I must never write when I do not want to write. -- Langston Hughes
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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. -- Langston Hughes
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Like a welcome summer rain, humor may suddenly cleanse and cool the earth, the air and you. -- Langston Hughes
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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. -- Langston Hughes
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Beauty for some provides escape, who gain a happiness in eyeing the gorgeous buttocks of the ape or Autumn sunsets exquisitely dying. -- Langston Hughes
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I have discovered in life that there are ways of getting almost anywhere you want to go, if you really want to go. -- Langston Hughes
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Democracy will not come Today, this year Nor ever Through compromise and fear. -- Langston Hughes
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Negro blood is sure powerful, because just one drop of black blood makes a colored man. One drop
you are a Negro! ... Black is powerful. -- Langston Hughes
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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, ... -- Langston Hughes
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7 x 7 + love = An amount Infinitely above: 7 x 7 - love. -- Langston Hughes
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Poetry is the human soul entire
Squeezed like a lemon or a lime,
Drop by drop into atomic words". -- Langston Hughes
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One of the great needs of Negro children is to have books about themselves and their lives that can help them be proud. -- Langston Hughes
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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! -- Langston Hughes
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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. -- Langston Hughes
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Whiskey just naturally likes me but beer likes me better. -- Langston Hughes
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Politics can be the graveyard of the poet. And only poetry can be his resurrection. -- Langston Hughes
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Keep your hand on the plow. Hold on. -- Langston Hughes
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Wear it Like a banner For the proud? Not like a shroud. -- Langston Hughes
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The prerequisite for writing is having something to say. -- Langston Hughes
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Life is a big sea full of many fish. I let down my nets and pulled. I'm still pulling. -- Langston Hughes
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We Negro writers, just by being black, have been on the blacklist all our lives. Censorship for us begins at the color line. -- Langston Hughes
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Oh, God of Dust and Rainbows, Help us to see That without the dust the rainbow Would not be. -- Langston Hughes
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American Heartbreak
I am the American heartbreak
The rock on which Freedom
Stumped its toe
The great mistake
That Jamestown made
Long ago. -- Langston Hughes
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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. -- Langston Hughes
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It were depression, too. They cut my wages down once at the foundry. They cut my wages down again. Then they cut my wages out, also the job. -- Langston Hughes
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Misery is when you heard on the radio that the neighborhood you live in is a slum but you always thought it was home. -- Langston Hughes
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My seeking has been to explain and illuminate the Negro condition in America and obliquely that of all human kind, -- Langston Hughes
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I wish the rent Was heaven sent. -- Langston Hughes
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Cheap little rhymes
A cheap little tune
Are sometimes as dangerous
As a sliver of the moon. -- Langston Hughes
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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. -- Langston Hughes
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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. -- Langston Hughes
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Gather out of star-dust, Earth-dust, Cloud-dust, Storm-dust, And splinters of hail, One handful of dream-dust, Not for sale. -- Langston Hughes
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Hold fast to dreams,
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird,
That cannot fly. -- Langston Hughes
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Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams ... -- Langston Hughes
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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. -- Langston Hughes
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Life dosent frighten me at all. -- Langston Hughes
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This is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America - this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible. -- Langston Hughes
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Even the 'Negro' shows like 'Amos and Andy' and 'Beulah' are written largely by white writers - the better to preserve the stereotypes, I imagine. -- Langston Hughes
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As much as they loved Negroes, Neroes didn't seem to love Michael and Anne. -- Langston Hughes
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Freedom
Is a strong seed
Planted
In a great need.
I live here, too.
I want freedom
Just as you. -- Langston Hughes
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I stuck my head out the window this morning and spring kissed me bang in the face. -- Langston Hughes
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As I learn from you,
I guess you learn
From me
although
You're older
and white
And somewhat more free. -- Langston Hughes
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Joe has sense enough to know
He is a god.
So many gods don't know. -- Langston Hughes
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Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed -
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above. -- Langston Hughes
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Everything there is but lovin' leaves a rust on your old soul -- Langston Hughes
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There is no color line in death. -- Langston Hughes
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A world I dream where black or white, whatever race you be, will share the bounties of the earth and every man is free -- Langston Hughes
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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! -- Langston Hughes
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Hard as I try, daddy-o, I really do not like concert singers. They are always singing in some foreign language. -- Langston Hughes
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When you turn the corner And you run into yourself Then you know that you have turned All the corners that are left. -- Langston Hughes
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Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love.
I like to work, read, learn, and understand life. -- Langston Hughes
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The sea is a desert of waves,
A wilderness of water. -- Langston Hughes
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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. -- Langston Hughes
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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. -- Langston Hughes
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Let America be America again. Let it be the dream it used to be. -- Langston Hughes
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These feet have walked ten thousand miles working for white folks and another ten thousand keeping up with colored. -- Langston Hughes
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When I were a young man, I used to play baseball and steal bases just like Jackie Robinson. If the empire would rule me out, I would get mad and hit the empire. -- Langston Hughes
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When a man starts out to build a world,
He starts first with himself -- Langston Hughes
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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. -- Langston Hughes
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You see, books had been happening to me. -- Langston Hughes
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Rest at pale evening ... A tall slim tree ... Night coming tenderly Black like me -- Langston Hughes
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They rung my bell to ask me.
Could I recommend a maid.
I said, yes, your momma. -- Langston Hughes
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It has seemed to me that most people are generally good, in every race and in every country where I have been. -- Langston Hughes
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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. -- Langston Hughes
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My writing has been largely concerned with the depicting of Negro life in America. -- Langston Hughes
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Humor is laughing at what you haven't got when you ought to have it. -- Langston Hughes
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Violent anger makes me physically ill. -- Langston Hughes
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My father hated Negroes. -- Langston Hughes
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I am a Negro: Black as the night is black, Black like the depths of my Africa. -- Langston Hughes
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Let the rain sing you a lullaby. -- Langston Hughes
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I swear to the Lord,I still can't see,Why Democracy means,Everybody but me. -- Langston Hughes
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When peoples care for you and cry for you, they can straighten out your soul. -- Langston Hughes
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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. -- Langston Hughes
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The depression brought everybody down a peg or two. And the Negro had but few pegs to fall. -- Langston Hughes
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Harriet Tubman lived to see the harvest. -- Langston Hughes
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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. -- Langston Hughes
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Road's in front o' me, Nothin' to do but walk. -- Langston Hughes
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Books -where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas -- Langston Hughes
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2 and 2 are 4.
4 and 4 are 8.
But what would happen
If the last 4 was late?
And how would it be
If one 2 was me?
Or if the first 4 was you
Divided by 2? -- Langston Hughes
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Reach Up Your Hand ... and take a star. -- Langston Hughes