I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all.

The Haitian people are gentle and lovable except for their enormous and unconscious cruelty.

If science ever gets to the bottom of Voodoo in Haiti and Africa, it will be found that some important medical secrets, still unknown to medical science, give it its power, rather than the gestures of ceremony.

Friendship is a mysterious and ocean-bottom thing. Who can know the outer ranges of it? Perhaps no human being has ever explored its limits.

It costs you something to do good!

If it was so honorable and glorious to be black, why was it the yellow-skinned people among us had so much prestige?

But as de old folk always say, Ah'm born but Ah ain't dead. No tellin' whut Ah'm liable tuh do yet.