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It is the duty of the younger Negro artist . . . to change through the force of his art that old whispering I want to be white, hidden in the aspirations of his people, to Why should I want to be white? I am a Negro - and beautiful!
Langston Hughes
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Langston Hughes
Age: 66 †
Born: 1901
Born: February 1
Died: 1967
Died: May 22
Biographer
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Journalist
Novelist
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Joplin
Missouri
James Langston Hughes
James Mercer Langston Hughes
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More quotes by Langston Hughes
For my best poems were all written when I felt the worst. When I was happy, I didn't write anything.
Langston Hughes
We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they aren?t it doesn?t matter.
Langston Hughes
I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen when company comes, but I laugh, and eat well, and grow strong.
Langston Hughes
Harriet Tubman lived to see the harvest.
Langston Hughes
I stay cool, and dig all jive, That's the way I stay alive. My motto, as I live and learn, is Dig and be dug In return.
Langston Hughes
Blues had the pulse beat of the people who keep on going.
Langston Hughes
I felt very bad in Washington. . . I didn't like my job, and I didn't know what was going to happen to me, and I was cold and half-hungry, so I wrote a great many poems.
Langston Hughes
When I were a young man, I used to play baseball and steal bases just like Jackie Robinson. If the empire would rule me out, I would get mad and hit the empire.
Langston Hughes
I am the American heartbreak- The rock on which Freedom Stumped its toe.
Langston Hughes
I've known rivers: I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
Langston Hughes
I will not take but for an answer.
Langston Hughes
I'm so tired of waiting, aren't you, for the world to become good and beautiful and kind?
Langston Hughes
Because my mouth Is wide with laughter And my throat Is deep with song, You do not think I suffer after I have held my pain So long? Because my mouth Is wide with laughter You do not hear My inner cry? Because my feet Are gay with dancing You do not know I die?
Langston Hughes
As long as what is is-and Georgia is Georgia-I will take Harlem for mine. At least, if trouble comes, I will have my own window to shoot from.
Langston Hughes
To create a market for your writing you have to be consistent, professional, a continuing writer - not just a one-article or a one-story or a one-book man.
Langston Hughes
They [the police] learned something from them Harlem riots. They used to beat your head right in public, but now they only beat it after they get you down to the station house.
Langston Hughes
Yet the ivory gods, And the ebony gods, And the gods of diamond-jade, Are only silly puppet gods That people themselves Have made.-
Langston Hughes
Humor is laughing at what you haven't got when you ought to have it ... what you wish in your secret heart were not funny, but it is, and you must laugh. Humor is your own unconscious therapy. Like a welcome summer rain, humor may suddenly cleanse and cool the earth, the air, and you.
Langston Hughes
Everybody should take each other as they are, white, black, Indians, Creole. Then there would be no prejudice, nations would get along.
Langston Hughes
I do not want no pretty woman. First thing you know, you fall in love with her-then you got to kill somebody about her. She'll make you so jealous, you'll bust!
Langston Hughes
