Top 100 Langston Hughes Quotes
#2. 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
#3. To my mind, it is the duty of the younger Negro artist, if he accepts any duties at all from outsiders, 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
#4. 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
#5. This morning I paid seventy cents for two little old dried-up slivers of bacon and one cockeyed egg. It took me till noon to get my appetite back.
Langston Hughes
#6. 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 are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too.
Langston Hughes
#7. An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose
Langston Hughes
#8. 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.
Langston Hughes
#9. 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
#10. 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.
Langston Hughes
#11. 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
#12. So since I'm still here livin', I guess I will live on. I could've died for love
But for livin' I was born.
Langston Hughes
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. America never was America to me And yet I swear this oath - America will be!
Langston Hughes
#16. The Dream Keeper
Bring me all of your dreams,
You dreamer,
Bring me all your
Heart melodies
That I may wrap them
In a blue cloud-cloth
Away from the too-rough fingers
Of the world.
Langston Hughes
#17. Joe has sense enough to know
He is a god.
So many gods don't know.
Langston Hughes
#18. Though you may hear me holler, And you may see me cry
I'll be dogged, sweet baby, If you gonna see me die.
Langston Hughes
#19. Color
Wear it
Like a banner
For the proud
Not like a shroud.
Wear it
Like a song
Soaring high
Not moan or cry.
Langston Hughes
#20. I am the American heartbreak- The rock on which Freedom Stumped its toe.
Langston Hughes
#21. Good morning, Revolution: You're the very best friend I ever had. We gonna pal around together from now on
Langston Hughes
#22. Oppression
Now dreams
Are not available
To the dreamers,
Nor songs
To the singers.
In some lands
Dark night
And cold steel
Prevail
But the dream
Will come back,
And the song
Break
Its jail.
Langston Hughes
#23. I live in Harlem, New York City. I am unmarried. I like 'Tristan,' goat's milk, short novels, lyric poems, heat, simple folk, boats and bullfights; I dislike 'Aida,' parsnips, long novels, narrative poems, cold, pretentious folk, buses and bridges.
Langston Hughes
#24. God in his infinite wisdom
Did not make me very wise-
So when my actions are stupid
They hardly take God by surprise.
Langston Hughes
#25. Peace
We passed their graves:
The dead men there,
Winners or losers,
Did not care.
In the dark
They could not see
Who had gained
The victory.
Langston Hughes
#26. A dog gets lonesome just like a human. He wants to associate with other dogs, but when they take him out, the poor dog is on a leash and cannot run around.
Langston Hughes
#27. White folks sure is a case!" She laid three slices of bread on top of the stove. "So spoiled with colored folks waiting on 'em all their days! Don't know what they'll do in heaven, 'cause I'm gonna sit down up there myself.
Langston Hughes
#28. Life is a egg you have to be patient and carefull with it or it will brake
Langston Hughes
#29. Everybody should take each other as they are, white, black, Indians, Creole. Then there would be no prejudice, nations would get along.
Langston Hughes
#30. The speaker catches fire
looking at their faces.
His words
jump down to stand
in listener's places.
Langston Hughes
#31. I stuck my head out the window this morning and spring kissed me bang in the face.
Langston Hughes
#32. Melting pot Harlem-Harlem of honey and chocolate and caramel and rum and vinegar and lemon and lime and gall. Dusky dream Harlem rumbling into a nightmare tunnel where the subway from the Bronx keeps right on downtown.
Langston Hughes
#33. Humor is when the joke's on you but hits the other fellow first
before it boomerangs.
Langston Hughes
#34. I have discovered in life that there are ways of getting almost anywhere you want to go, if you really want to go.
Langston Hughes
#35. The only way to get a thing done is to start to do it, then keep on doing it, and finally you'll finish it, ...
Langston Hughes
#37. I am so tired of waiting.
Aren't you,
for the world to become good
and beautiful and kind?
Let us take a knife
and cut the world in two
and see what worms are eating
at the rind.
Langston Hughes
#40. Jazz, to me, is one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America: the eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul - the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world, a world of subway trains, and work, work, work; the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile.
Langston Hughes
#41. I tire so of hearing people say, Let things take their course. Tomorrow is another day. I do not need my freedom when I'm dead. I cannot live on tomorrow's bread.
Langston Hughes
#43. Certainly there is, for the American Negro artist who can escape the restrictions the more advanced among his own group would put upon him, a great field of unused material ready for his art.
Langston Hughes
#44. Wear it Like a banner For the proud? Not like a shroud.
Langston Hughes
#45. Frosting Freedom Is just frosting On somebody else's Cake
And so must be Till we Learn how to Bake.
Langston Hughes
#46. My seeking has been to explain and illuminate the Negro condition in America and obliquely that of all human kind,
Langston Hughes
#47. I don't dare start thinking in the morning. I don't dare start thinking in the morning. If I thought thoughts in bed, Them thoughts would bust my head
So I don't dare start thinking in the morning.
Langston Hughes
#49. Writing is like travelling. It's wonderful to go somewhere, but you get tired of staying.
Langston Hughes
#50. 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!
Langston Hughes
#51. 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
#52. Life is a system of half-truths and lies, Opportunistic, convenient evasion.
Langston Hughes
#53. Good evening, daddy! Ain't you heard The boogie-woogie rumble Of a dream deferred? Trilling the treble And twining the bass Into midnight ruffles Of cat-gut lace.
Langston Hughes
#54. Hold fast to dreams,
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird,
That cannot fly.
Langston Hughes
#55. In all my life, I have never been free. I have never been able to do anything with freedom, except in the field of my writing.
Langston Hughes
#56. Very early in life, it seemed to me that there was a relationship between the problems of the Negro people in America and the Jewish people in Russia, and that the Jewish people's problems were worse than ours.
Langston Hughes
#57. But there are certain very practical things American Negro writers can do. And must do. There's a song that says, "the time ain't long." That song is right. Something has got to change in America-and change soon. We must help that change to come.
Langston Hughes
#58. 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
#61. Like a welcome summer rain, humor may suddenly cleanse and cool the earth, the air and you.
Langston Hughes
#62. Lawrence has a wonderful hill in it, with a university on top and the first time I ran away from home, I ran up the hill and looked across the world: Kansas wheat fields and the Kaw River, and I wanted to go some place, too. I got a whipping for it.
Langston Hughes
#63. I look at my own body
With eyes no longer blind-
And I see that my own hands can make
The world that's in my mind.
Langston Hughes
#64. Blues had the pulse beat of the people who keep on going.
Langston Hughes
#65. Justice
That Justice is a blind goddess
Is a thing to which we black are wise:
Her bandage hides two festering sores
That once perhaps were eyes.
Langston Hughes
#66. We Negro writers, just by being black, have been on the blacklist all our lives. Censorship for us begins at the color line.
Langston Hughes
#69. Afraid
We cry among the skyscrapers
As our ancestors
Cried among the palms in Africa
Because we are alone,
It is night,
And we're afraid.
Langston Hughes
#70. Life is a big sea full of many fish. I let down my nets and pulled. I'm still pulling.
Langston Hughes
#71. My chief literary influences have been Paul Laurence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, and Walt Whitman. My favorite public figures include Jimmy Durante, Marlene Dietrich, Mary McLeod Bethune, Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Marian Anderson, and Henry Armstrong.
Langston Hughes
#72. The past has been a mint Of blood and sorrow. That must not be True of tomorrow.
Langston Hughes
#73. 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
#74. Even the 'Negro' shows like 'Amos and Andy' and 'Beulah' are written largely by white writers - the better to preserve the stereotypes, I imagine.
Langston Hughes
#75. I know how to handle women who act like ladies, but my landlady ain't no lady. Sometimes I even wish I was living with my wife again so I could have my own place and not have no landladies.
Langston Hughes
#76. A world I dream where black or white, whatever race you be, will share the bounties of the earth and every man is free
Langston Hughes
#78. Politics can be the graveyard of the poet. And only poetry can be his resurrection.
Langston Hughes
#79. 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.
Langston Hughes
#81. Misery is when you heard on the radio that the neighborhood you live in is a slum but you always thought it was home.
Langston Hughes
#82. O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.
Langston Hughes
#84. How still,
How strangely still
The water is today,
It is not good
For water
To be so still that way.
~ "Sea Calm
Langston Hughes
#85. Because shoes got by devilish ways will burn your feet.
Langston Hughes
#86. I'm so tired of waiting, aren't you, for the world to become good and beautiful and kind?
Langston Hughes
#87. 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
#88. Everything there is but lovin' leaves a rust on your old soul
Langston Hughes
#89. Humor is laughing at what you haven't got when you ought to have it.
Langston Hughes
#90. Rest at pale evening ... A tall slim tree ... Night coming tenderly Black like me
Langston Hughes
#91. Hang yourself, poet, in your own words.
Otherwise, you are dead.
Langston Hughes
#92. Whiskey just naturally likes me but beer likes me better.
Langston Hughes
#93. Quiet Girl
I would liken you
To a night without stars
Were it not for your eyes.
I would liken you
To a sleep without dreams
Were it not for your songs.
Langston Hughes
#94. The rain plays a little sleep song on our roof at night And I love the rain.
Langston Hughes
#95. 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
#96. The prerequisite for writing is having something to say.
Langston Hughes
#97. These feet have walked ten thousand miles working for white folks and another ten thousand keeping up with colored.
Langston Hughes
#98. 2 and 2 are 4.
4 and 4 are 8.
But what would happen
If the last 4 was late?
And how would it be
If one 2 was me?
Or if the first 4 was you
Divided by 2?
Langston Hughes
#99. One of the great needs of Negro children is to have books about themselves and their lives that can help them be proud.
Langston Hughes
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