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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

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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
Grows
Company
Darker
Comes
Kitchen
Strong
Send
Wells
Laugh
Well
Brother
Laughing
Grow

More quotes by Langston Hughes

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Let America be America, where equality is in the air we breathe.
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Teach us all to do right, Lord, please, and to get along together with that atom bomb on this earth because I do not want it to fall on me-nor Thee-nor anybody living. Amen!
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I have discovered in life that there are ways of getting almost anywhere you want to go, if you really want to go.
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We Negro writers, just by being black, have been on the blacklist all our lives. Censorship for us begins at the color line.
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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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There is no color line in art.
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If you want to honor me, give some young boy or girl who's coming along trying to create arts and write and compose and sing and act and paint and dance and make something out of the beauties of the Negro race-give that child some help.
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What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore-- And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over-- like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode?
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I am the American heartbreak- The rock on which Freedom Stumped its toe.
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This is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America - this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible.
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I went down to the river, I set down on the bank. I tried to think but couldn't, So I jumped in and sank.
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Believing everything she read In the daily news, (No in-between to choose) She thought that only One side won, Not that BOTH Might lose.
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I will not take 'but' for an answer. Negroes have been looking at democracy's 'but' too long.
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Politics in any country in the world is dangerous. For the poet, politics in any country had better be disguised as poetry. Politics can be the graveyard of the poet. And only poetry can be his resurrection.
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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.
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For poems are like rainbows they escape you quickly.
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I'm so tired of waiting, aren't you, for the world to become good and beautiful and kind?
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Though you may hear me holler, And you may see me cry-- I'll be dogged, sweet baby, If you gonna see me die.
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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.
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I asked you, baby, If you understood- You told me that you didn't, But you thought you would.
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