When one is too old for love, one finds great comfort in good dinners.

No matter how far a person can go the horizon is still way beyond you.

I do not weep at the world I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.

I don't know any more about the future than you do. I hope that it will be full of work, because I have come to know by experience that work is the nearest thing to happiness that I can find. . . I want a busy life, a just mind and a timely death.

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.

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

She had an inside and an outside now and suddenly she knew how not to mix them.