Books -where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas

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.

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.

Hard as I try, daddy-o, I really do not like concert singers. They are always singing in some foreign language.

These feet have walked ten thousand miles working for white folks and another ten thousand keeping up with colored.

It has seemed to me that most people are generally good, in every race and in every country where I have been.

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.