Robert Hayden Quotes

As you continue writing and rewriting, you begin to see possibilities you hadn't seen before. Writing a poem is always a process of discovery.

Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fire blazes. No one ever thanked him.

This freedom, this liberty, this beautiful and terrible thing, needful to man as air, usable as earth.

I believe it's true that one person can make a difference. But how much more difference 100 people make, or rather 99.

We must not be frightened nor cajoled into accepting evil as deliverance from evil. We must go on struggling to be human, though monsters of abstractions police and threaten us.

[My poetry is] a way of coming to grips with reality . . . a way of discovery and definition. It is a way of solving for the unknowns.

Art is not escape, but a way of finding order in chaos, a way of confronting life.