Keep your hand on the plow. Hold on.

Rest at pale evening... A tall slim tree... Night coming tenderly Black like me

Harriet Tubman lived to see the harvest.

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

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

Life is for the living. Death is for the dead. Let life be like music. And death a note unsaid.

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.