Janie looked down on him and felt a self-crushing love. So her soul crawled out from its hiding place.

Grown people know that they do not always know the way of things, and even if they think they know, they do not know where and how they got the proof.

I maintain that I have been a Negro three times--a Negro baby, a Negro girl and a Negro woman. Still, if you have received no clear cut impression of what the Negro in America is like, then you are in the same place with me. There is no The Negro here. Our lives are so diversified, internal attitudes so varied, appearances and capabilities so different, that there is no possible classification so catholic that it will cover us all, except My people! My people!

It was a weak spot in any nation to have a large body of disaffected people within its confusion.

Love, I find, is like singing.

Oh to be a pear tree – any tree in bloom! With kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world!

I am colored but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother's side was not an Indian chief.