For four hundred years the blacks of Haiti had yearned for peace. for three hundred years the island was spoken of as a paradise of riches and pleasures, but that was in reference to the whites to whom the spirit of the land gave welcome. Haiti has meant split blood and tears for blacks.

If you want that good feeling that comes from doing things for other folks then you have to pay for it in abuse and misunderstanding.

God took pattern after a pine tree and built you noble.

I made up my mind to keep my feelings to myself since they did not seem to matter to anyone else but me.

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!

The sun had become a light yellow yolk and was walking with red legs across the sky.

A thing is mighty big when time and distance cannot shrink it.