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

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!

Life for me ain't been no crystal stair

Love is a naked shadow, On a gnarled and naked tree.

The depression brought everybody down a peg or two. And the Negroes had but few pegs to fall.

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.

Reach Up Your Hand... and take a star.