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Life for me ain't been no crystal stair

Langston Hughes

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Langston Hughes
Age: 66 †
Born: 1901
Born: February 1
Died: 1967
Died: May 22
Biographer
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Writer
Joplin
Missouri
James Langston Hughes
James Mercer Langston Hughes
Crystal
Crystals
Stairs
Life
Stair
Splinters

More quotes by Langston Hughes

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I am a Negro: Black as the night is black, Black like the depths of my Africa.
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I will not take but for an answer.
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Out of love, No regrets-- Though the goodness Be wasted forever. Out of love, No regrets-- Though the return Be never.
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Yet the ivory gods, And the ebony gods, And the gods of diamond-jade, Are only silly puppet gods That people themselves Have made.-
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There is no color line in death. I swear to the lord I still can't see Why Democracy means Everybody but me. O, yes, I say it plain, America never was America to me, And yet I swear this oath - America will be! I am the American heartbreak- The rock on which Freedom Stumped its toe.
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Reach Up Your Hand... and take a star.
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Let America be America, where equality is in the air we breathe.
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When poems stop talking about the moon and begin to mention poverty, trade unions, color, color lines and colonies, somebody tells the police.
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Life is an egg you have to be patient and careful with it or it will break.
Langston Hughes
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For my best poems were all written when I felt the worst. When I was happy, I didn't write anything.
Langston Hughes
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Words Like Freedom There are words like Freedom Sweet and wonderful to say. On my heartstrings freedom sings All day everyday. There are words like Liberty That almost make me cry. If you had known what I know You would know why.
Langston Hughes
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The depression brought everybody down a peg or two. And the Negroes had but few pegs to fall.
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One of the great difficulties about being a member of a minority race is that so many kindhearted, well-meaning bores gather around to help.
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Americans of good-will, the nice decent church people, the well-meaning liberals, the good hearted souls who themselves wouldn't lynch anyone, must begin to realize that they have to be more than passively good-hearted, more than church goingly Christian, and much more than word-of-mouth in the liberalism.
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I did not believe political directives could be successfully applied to creative writing . . . not to poetry or fiction, which to be valid had to express as truthfully as possible the individual emotions and reactions of the writer.
Langston Hughes
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7 x 7 + love = An amount Infinitely above: 7 x 7 - love.
Langston Hughes
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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
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My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
Langston Hughes
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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
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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